Month: September 2009

Challenge Wrap-Up, READING CHALLENGES 2009

Countdown Challenge – Unfinished

Tara

Well, I didn’t finish the Countdown Challenge. Oh well. I tried. Hard. But for some unknown reason I really struggled with it. When I signed up I thought it would be easy to accomplish, especially since I joined late and it was retroactive to August 2008 and I had so many books already done. However, I didn’t do too bad; I completed 39 out of 45 books which is 86% complete. Not bad in my opinion. I’m going to sign up for the second year of this one (which starts today) and try again 🙂

Here is what I managed to read for this challenge:

2009

  1. Heart of Ice by Gregg Olsen
  2. The Osiris Alliance by Jack Ford
  3. The 8th Confession by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
  4. BoneMan’s Daughter by Ted Dekker
  5. The Dyodyne Experiment by James Doulgeris & V. Michael Santoro
  6. Dancing with Ana by Nicole Barker
  7. Swimsuit by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro

2008 (Completed)

  1. A Cold Dark Place by Gregg Olsen
  2. One Last Scream by Kevin O’Brien
  3. Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman
  4. Trust Me by Brenda Novak
  5. Quicksand by Iris Johansen
  6. The Chemist by Janson Mancheski
  7. Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain
  8. The Midnight Twins by Jacquelyn Mitchard

2007 (Completed)

  1. All the Pretty Girls by J.T. Ellison
  2. Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
  3. Last Known Victim by Erica Spindler
  4. The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver
  5. In the Woods by Tana French
  6. I Heard That Song Before by Mary Higgins Clark
  7. Over Your Dead Body by David L.

2006 (Completed)

  1. A Necessary Evil by Alex Kava
  2. Judge & Jury by James Patterson
  3. New Moon by Stephanie Meyer
  4. The Witness by Sandra Brown
  5. The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry
  6. Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris

2005

  1. Presumed Guilty: What the Jury Never Knew About Laci Peterson’s Murder and Why Scott Peterson Should Not Be on Death Row by Matt Dalton
  2. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
  3. To the Power of Three by Laura Lippman
  4. Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

2004 (Completed)

  1. Night Fall by Nelson DeMille
  2. Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay
  3. Black Creek Crossing by John Saul
  4. White Hot by Sandra Brown

2003

  1. The Falls by Karen Harper
  2. She Loves Me Not by Wendy Corsi Staub

2002

2001 (Completed)

  1. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
3/5, AUTHOR, Book Review, Fiction, H, RATING, Read in 2009, READING CHALLENGES 2009

REVIEW: Real Murders by Charlaine Harris

Tara

Real Murders
by Charlaine Harris

Copyright: 1990
Pages: 175
Rating: 3/5
Read: Sept. 2-6, 2009
Challenge:  2009 100+ Reading Challenge; 2009 1st in a Series Challenge; A Well-Rounded Challenge
Yearly Count: 46

First Line: “Tonight I want to tell you about that most fascinating of murder mysteries, the Wallace case,” I told my mirror Enthusiastically.

Aurora “Roe” Teagarden is a small-town librarian. Nothing much really happens in her town of Lawrenceton. The peak of her excitement comes from her monthly meetings with her group “Real Murders.” They are just a group of people who share an interest in past murder cases. But when one of the members turns up dead at one of their meetings, with her murder scene looking suspcisiously like that of a murder case from the past that Roe recognizes. As time goes on, others in this small town turn up dead, also seemingly patterned after other famous murder cases. Roe can’t help but wonder who is at the heart of these murders – it almost has to be a member of Real Murders … but who could it be?

Okay, so I love the Harper Connelly series and was looking forward to giving this series a try. I liked it to a degree, however there were numerous spelling errors in this book (which really irritates me to no end). But for some reason I didn’t immediately take to this book. I mean it was okay in the end, but I felt as if it was missing something, I don’t really know how to describe my feelings though. It had a slow start. And I felt as if the character development lacked a little bit. But overall it was a decent book and I will probably continue on with this series, I just don’t know if I’ll be rushing to continue it.

4/5, AUTHOR, Book Review, Nonfiction, RATING, Read in 2009, READING CHALLENGES 2009, S

REVIEW: sTORItelling by Tori Spelling

Tara

sTORItelling
by Tori Spelling

Copyright: 2008
Pages: 271
Rating: 4/5
Read: Aug. 31-Sept. 1, 2009
Challenge:  2009 100+ Reading Challenge
Yearly Count: 45

First Line: When you’re a kid, you don’t worry about what anyone thinks.

Tori Spelling … her name along can evoke a lot of different ideas in one’s head. Donna Martin – America’s Virgin. Aaron Spelling’s daughter. Well-known feud with her mother. So I guess people either love or hate her. Me, I had no real opinion about her going into this book. There was a lot in here that I didn’t know much about to be honest. I knew that she had been raised in an unimaginably huge house (not quite accurate) and her father had bought her a white Christmas one year with the help of a snow machine (accurate) and that she had played Donna Martin, America’s favorite virgin on 90210 (accurate) and that she had been married in a fairy-tale wedding (it was someone’s fairy tale, just not hers) and that she divorced abruptly and remarried in the blink of an eye (fairly accurate) oh and now she has two kids. Okay, so that pretty much summed up what I knew about Tori Spelling. But this book really opened up her world. Tori came across as a girl who had grown up with everything but then didn’t understand when she had to actually work for everything once she turned 16. She seemed to want nothing more than acceptance and love and it didn’t come easy to her. Her life is full of disappointments and sometimes regrets. But you know what, that makes her like every other person. She really proves that life isn’t fair to Tori Spelling. I mean, take for example the fact that her father was reportedly worth $500 million dollars upon his death, all she got out of the will was $800,000 BEFORE taxes … she had to pay rent to her mother for the condo that she lived in for 10 years … she was in debt before she realized what had happened. I guess some people might see this book as nothing more than a sob story, but I really found it enlightening. Sure, she seems to have had a pretty screwed up childhood, but I think that after she met Dean maybe she finally did find what she was looking for in life. Regardless of whatever preconceived notions you have about her, I really do recommend giving this book a shot … if nothing else, it definitely has some hilarious moments like this one:

Dad told me that in order to earn my allowance, I’d have to help out around the house, so he gave me a job and said he’d do it with me. Every weekend we’d go out into the yard to scoop up dog poo and rake leaves. That’s right, every weekend TV mogul Aaron Spelling, net worth equivalent to some small island nation, went out and scooped poo with his daughter (p. 12).

Oh yeah – and her first kiss was with Screech!