Reading, Reading, Reading!

When I set the goal of reading 100 books this year I thought it would be a cinch. I read so much that I thought 100 books would be a piece of cake and that my goal would be completed by the summer. How wrong I was! As summer turned into fall and I still hadn't reached my goal I started to get a little nervous. One Sunday at church the older gentleman who lends me history books handed me a book comparable in size to the Bible about the entire history of Europe and I just knew that if I started reading that book that my goal would never be achieved. I put that one aside for the moment and persevered through the remaining number of books I needed. Finally, this past week, I reached the big 100! It always feels so good to accomplish one of my personal goals. Since I hardly ever do any blogging about myself I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite books from this past year.

The Rangers Apprentice series has become one of my absolute favorites! There are 10 books in the series and I zoomed through each book in about a day; I just could NOT put them down. It always amazes me that an author can create characters that the reader comes to love and talk about as if they are friends and that's how David and my sister and I would talk about the people in these books.

An author that I read for the first time this year is Juliet Marillier and I absolutely fell in love with her style of writing. During the year I have read 8 of her books and have enjoyed all of them but the two that I absolutely fell in love with are Daughter of the Forest and Son of the Shadows. As soon as I finished reading I just wanted to start reading them all over again and that hasn't happened for me in a long time.


East was such a fun read! I told the kids all about it one night and Savannah, who became enthralled with what she heard me tell, picked up the book and read it herself.

Unbroken was one of the most amazing books I read all year and would highly recommend to everyone. The writing is beautiful and draws the reader from the get-go into the story of Louis Zamperini's life...and what an amazing life it was. Once again I had my kids riveted at the dinner table with tales of plane crashes, survival on a raft for over five weeks, shark attacks, and capture by the Japanese. It was right after I read the appalling stories of life as a POW in a Japanese camp that we had an incident at dinner. Noah sat down to eat and was apparently disgusted about what I had made for dinner. He announced loudly that this food was gross and he would not eat it. I got very angry and said very firmly to all my children that in THIS house we will NOT complain about food. While imprisoned by the Japanese our brave American soldiers were only allowed a small ball of rice to eat each day so our family will NEVER take food for granted!!! Noah sat down and ate. Funny story but truthfully I can not say enough good things about this book.

Surprisingly enough I had never read Little Women and found it to be absolutely wonderful.

This one appealed to the romantic in me.

Although I did not like the main character in this book, the story of the mother was heartbreaking but powerful.

I love, love, love reading biographies and the book on Peter the Great and the two volumes about Hitler were fascinating. I love when authors can make a history book read like a novel and these biographies are definitely very readable.


Reading is one of my favorite things to do and I am always looking for good recommendations. If you haven't already, check out the website www.goodreads.com and become my friend!