Finished Safer by Sean Doolittle.
This book jumps back and forth over several months. It opens with the main character being arrested and goes on to explain how he's been set up (or so he says) by a neighbor of his, Roger, who is (of course) the most beloved man in town.
It's a very suspenseful book and I had a hard time putting it down. I wasn't crazy about the ending, but I may have just been exhausted from not ever wanting to put it down to do things like, say, sleep. :)
I'll see how I feel about it after a re-read. :)
Merry Christmas from my dog.
To my adorable friends: always sing without fear.
Happy Holidays and may you have a New Year that embraces you with all the good things you desire.
Finished The Christmas Lamp by Lori Copeland.
I think this is another example of "books I like because I am completely exhausted and they are easy and sweet." And also, in this case, seasonally appropriate. :)
Roni lives and works in Nativity, Missouri. The little town isn't doing so well (not many tourists; businesses are closing) and someone's just arrived to help cut expenditures, a guy named Jake.
It's a sweet story and it ends happily. :) It's a little less than realistic, but it's Christmas, so who cares, right? :)
Finished The Sweet By and By by Sara Evans with Rachel Hauck for Thomas Nelson.
Jade is about to get married but there's a sticking point--she has to decide whether to invite her mother to the wedding. She's been estranged from her mother (Beryl) for years, and she isn't sure whether it's worth the drama to have her there. Beryl used to be a hippie and spent much of her three kids' childhoods on the road with one musician boyfriend (or husband) or another.
You should know that this is Christian fiction, although that wasn't too noticeable until the end. So if that would bug you, this probably isn't a book you'd enjoy. (Although you'd probably like it until the end.)
I liked the pacing of the book a great deal. The details of Jade and Beryl's relationship was revealed in a timely fashion and there was a decent twist that kept changing everything.
I read the book yesterday, after I was exhausted from being at work for 30 hours. Would I have liked it this much if it weren't essentially the literary equivalent of comfort food? I'm not sure. But I read this book at the perfect time, and I really enjoyed it.
It's probably also good that I read it right before Christmas, since the book's main themes are about love and forgiveness.
I preferred to think that the tree had not been touched by human hands. Instead, I wanted to imagine a type of botanical, seasonal transition: that the green blood had crystallized into silver, gold and scarlet. And when the joy could no longer be hidden, the blossoms appeared in delicate explosions. Their thin metallic skins would shine with a clear complexion - in colors that were pure and inspirational.
It would be impossible not to pluck this Christmas fruit from the tree that dared to bloom in the late autumn, with winter peering over the Advent horizon like a mischievous child.
They would be irresistible. They would have a scent like an expectant kitchen, full of spices that had traveled through history from the misunderstood continents, the lands of Western fear, of medieval confusion. They would taste like snow falling from the festive clouds: a profusion of crystals blowing through the white air in blissful geometry.
And inside of each one would lie a seed, a tiny window looking into the heart of the fruit. The pulp would be flavored with these sweet prisms - with the alluring light that turned the orchards of this holiday crop into a starry countryside.
And now this tree was heavy with their radiance. But I decided not to pick the glittering baubles from their branches. I chose a different harvest. I left the tree and its glittering yield behind, knowing that I would be enjoying its shining feast whenever I closed my eyes.
Finished The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. This is a prequel to my favorite book ever, The Shadow of the Wind.
This is very different from Shadow of the Wind but it's still great.
Here's the synopsis from the back of the book--I don't want to spoil anything, because this is really good.
"In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at an unsolved mystery.
Like a slow poison, the history of the place and an impossible love bring David close to despair. But then he receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike any other - a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realzies that there is a connection between this haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.
Set in the turbulent 1920s, The Angel's Game takes us back to the gothic universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere & Sons bookshop, in a masterful tale about the magic of books and the darkest corners of the human soul."
People will say Axial Tilt [Saturn/Mithras/Jesus/Santa] is the Reason for the Season.
One thing is certain, and eternal; in the northern hemisphere, these are dark days with little sunlight. Celebrating the waning of the year by lighting strings of lights and candles, decorating with shiny objects, spending time with people close to you, and eating special rich foods is something to cherish, a way to foster good will and create lovely memories. It's a way to launch ourselves into the cold days of winter with the satisfying sense that our lives follow the cyclical pattern of the sun, moon, and rotation of our earth.
Adding personal components of religion and mythology can be satisfying for many people. I admit that when some of those people insist that those components are the one true way to do things, I am put off and put out. The most we may owe them is a perpetuation of some of the pagan decorating traditions that might have otherwise been forgotten if not for their co-opting by the Catholic Church. But the seasons are important to me personally. It's impossible to imagine living my life without taking joy in the astronomical phenomena that produce the seasons of varying warmth and light in their turn. I take comfort in the pattern, and would still do so if I lived somewhere that never got cold in winter, or if I lived in the southern hemisphere and watched the pattern played out in reverse.
This is not the time to discuss biblical stories of creation, how the bible was put together by a fickle emperor and then later massaged into different forms by different religious leaders who used it for political agenda, or how those stories are parallels to stories told thousands of years earlier by fearful people who needed ways to explain astronomical, meteorological and geological conditions they did not yet understand, to explain the wonders and terrors of life and death, and to band together against groups with more powerful leaders than theirs.
This is not the time for that because a lasting truth is that people like to believe in stuff bigger than they are, they like it to be mysteriously powerful, and they like to put a familiar human face on it. They like the notion of strength from vulnerability, and the little guy championing over the big guy. They like an eternal father figure, in some cases an eternal mother figure, and the symbolism of those figures is far more important to most people than concrete explanations for how the world actually works. Unexplainably wondrous and mysterious works by someone who's looking out for us are way more palatable to a lot of people than the still being uncovered scientific wonders of neutrons and amino acids.
And people like to have parties. Coming up with an excuse for a party is harder for some people than others. For many of us, the opportunity to look forward to something shiny and fun is enough. Throw in the luxury of giving people gifts wrapped in pretty paper, and it's a big winner. No wonder Christmas is a continuing hit. For most people, the only slightly off-kilter aspect of it is the name, invented by people who could not appreciate a celebration unless it was attended (or better yet, replaced) by the solemnity of religious ritual.
I enjoy thinking (heretically to many,) that we really are all celebrating the exact same thing, just with different faces on the various rituals we perform each year.
If you believe a God with human characteristics set the Earth on its axial tilt, and later caused a young girl to give birth to his corporeal son as a reminder that no matter how much anyone's life sucks, he's still out there in ultimate control, and that all this is the true or only "reason for the season," I hope you have a really great one this year, and this song's for you.
If you just really dig having end of year fun, or like to groove on seasonal changes as I do, this song's for you.
What would it take to get you to start a new life on a new world?
Sponsored by AVATAR. In theaters December 18. Buy tickets now.
Nothing short of a catastrophic natural or political disaster. The vast majority of my ancestors were not explorers; they were refugees, in a sense. They fled poverty, hunger, and religious persecution. I couldn't leave my home for anything less than that, either.
The Cylon tester is now operational and Adama and Roslin each want the other to get tested first. Adama thinks it's a good idea for people to have confidence in the president and Roslin remembers that the captured Cylon told her that Adama was another Cylon.
It's hard for her to doubt that when he starts acting very strangely. He's distracted a great deal of the time, and he's been making mysterious phone calls and takes a ship, leaving no flight plan.
Turns out he isn't doing Cylon business--he's picking up Col. Tigh's estranged wife, Ellen.
Ellen's pretty awful. She drinks a lot (she was drunk in almost all of her scenes) and she's manipulative and just wretched.
Adama canceled his test and had Baltar test Ellen first (only one test can be done at a time and the results take 11 hours to come in). Ellen is not a Cylon, just an awful person.
(Except, of course, the "Cylon detector" is a joke and all the results will come back human. So I guess technically, she could be a Cylon after all.)
Here's Bekki's take. She didn't like Ellen Tigh, either.
