Books by Authors I Like:
Jim Trelease takes on the Herculean task of teaching parents how to help their children love reading--and makes it seem easy and logical. In this latest edition is research into hows and whys of reading to children and even lists of great read-aloud books broken down by age. Every household should have a copy of this book lying around (according to my amazing mother who taught me to love reading).
Rebel security task force operative protects country-music star from her stalker. He takes her to his hometown to lay low while they draw out the culprit. Not my favorite, but an enjoyably clean read with engaging side characters.
Two broken characters find love as they build houses for hurricane victims in Puerto Rico. Not a great novel by any means and the romance moved too quickly for me to find it believable, but it was worth a read if you need another clean romance. It's just not one I would reread, so Kindle Unlimited was fine for me.
Books I'm Adding to My Reading List:
This is the first book in a romance quartet of Orphan Train tales. A woman takes her two younger siblings on the orphan train as an outplacement agent and finds her calling in life as she strives to protect and place her charges. Evidently involves a wide scope of true-type incidents to paint a vivid picture of life for the orphans farmed out for hard labor or even brothels.
Five Christian novels where lost mail leads to unexpected happiness. Best part? It's free.
London perfumer takes a journey to Turkey with her neighbor to discover her past and decide her future. Marc Levy is an author that's been on my list for a while (Me Before You, P.S. From Paris) but I haven't actually read. Worst things said about this novel? A little boring in places and doesn't quite have the gravitas to deal realistically with the main event she can't remember from her past--not enough to discourage me from giving this a try.
A classic on sale this week for fans of the PBS/Masterpiece series. Ross Poldark returns from war to find his father dead, his home a wreck, and his love engaged to his cousin. Instead of running away or moving on, he decides to stay and fights to build a new life for himself. This is part of a twelve-book saga about generations of Poldarks in Cornwall. Something new I learned? This was only written a hundred years ago, when I was under the impression it was a Nineteenth-Century classic.
I'm not much for alternate realities, but this novel really grabbed my attention: a literature-obsessed England where dodos are the bird of choice and you can literally live moments from your favorite novels. But a wanted criminal is stealing characters from their own novels--most notably the redoubtable Jane Eyre. Heroine Thursday Next is on the case!
A Few Nonfiction Titles to Shed Some Light on NASA Life:
Chasing New Horizons takes us inside NASA politics and engineering to the decades-long fight to send a successful probe to find out what lies beyond Pluto. We get to learn the backstory to the amazing photos that captured the interest of the world on July of 2015--and see some of the photos reproduced in the book. Journalist Tom Wolfe brings to life the major players' struggles and contributions in the American Space Race in The Right Stuff. Someday I hope to make it through the 1983 movie adaption, but it had a lot of language in it! The Mercury 13 tells the story of the first trained female astronauts at NASA--who were never allowed to go into space though they passed the same tests as the men. I'm definitely interested to know what they sacrificed to get to NASA, to stay there through the training, and what they managed to accomplish after their dreams fell through.
