Chocolate, Waters, Roanoke, Homemade life, Hide or Seek

Chocolate by Donna Hay is a lovely book with gorgeous photography. I made a few of the recipes; the Chocolate Panna Cotta wasn't unmoldable, but it tasted great and the others turned out fine.

Though waters roar by Lynn Austin is a novel about women fighting for what they believe in, such as ending slavery, the temperance movement and women suffrage. The story was interesting, but a bit disjointed as it is being remembered by a descendant of the main characters who is in jail and trying to explain why at the same time.

Roanoke : the lost colony by Angela Elwell Hunt is an interesting and plausible novel about the colonists who disappeared from Roanoke. The main character, Jocelyn, has a difficult marriage with a Puritan minister who causes many of the problems in the story.

A homemade life : stories and recipes from my kitchen table by Molly Wizenberg is by the writer of the blog, Orangette. Each chapter is an anecdote from her life with a recipe at the end to go along with it. Interesting and some really great recipes (especially the braised cabbage), but an awful lot of personal details from a young writer.

The new Hide or Seek by James C. Dobson is about building self-confidence in children. I thought it was good and got my husband to read a chapter. He wants to read more, but it's overdue at the library.

Gift tags

Download these vintage-style Christmas gift tags as my gift to you,
print them out on card stock, then cut them out, punch a hole in a
corner and tie them to your gifts!

Mountain Top

Mountain Top by Robert Whitlow. I thought this was a good story. It's about a former lawyer who is now a minister and his defense of an eccentric older man who is accused of robbing a church. His involvement lands him in a lot of trouble but he learn a few things along the way.

Christmas Books

All of these books had many full-colour photos.

The complete Christmas book : the all-you-need guide to a memorable Christmas, with recipes, crafts and decorating ideas by the editors of Canadian Living magazine. This book has mostly recipes, with crafts and decorating ideas here and there throughout the book. I have six bookmarks in it, so this is definitely a favourite.

Decorating for Christmas by Kasey Rogers is not a book I would recommend. The crafts and decorations weren't very nice and the photography was terrible.

Country Christmas : decorating the home for the festive season by Caroline Atkins was a nice book, but I didn't like it as much as some of the others I read.

Beautiful Christmas : 250 best ideas for a memorable holiday by Carol Field Dahlstrom. This one is really nice with lots of beautiful, easy crafts and decorating ideas as well as delicious-looking recipes.

Christmas, make it sparkle : 225 simple crafts, food & decorating ideas for your holiday home, also by Carol Field Dahlstrom has many lovely crafts and recipes too. (I think I borrowed too many Christmas books from the library; I'll never get to try everything I liked in these books.)

Finding Faith, Last Resort, Essentially Lilly, and A Perilous Proposal

Finding Faith by Denise Hunter is about a woman reporter who is trying to land her dream job and is majorly messing up her marriage in the process. I read it quite a while ago so I don't really remember much.

Last Resort by Hannah Alexander is about a family that owns a lumber mill and a lot of valuable land. A 12-year-old girl in the family is abducted and found the next day in a cave on the property. She has a feeling that her abductor was a family member, so everyone becomes suspicious of the others until eventually, with lots of searching, the long-hidden secrets come out. I liked this book.

Essentially Lilly : a guide to colorful holidays by Lilly Pulitzer contains mostly recipes and Lilly's family history of what happened on past memorable holidays. I found several recipes to try that look yummy, but the stories weren't to my taste.

A Perilous Proposal by Michael Phillips is about people in the American South around the time of the civil war. When I started reading it, I realized that I had read it before and remembered most of it, so I sent it back to the library. It was interesting but the story kind of goes on and on like a lot of this author's books do.

Christmas, Ultimate Handcrafted Christmas, Christmas Gifts, European Christmas

Donna Hay Christmas: simple recipes, menu planners is a lovely book.
The photography is awesome and the recipes are easy.

The Ultimate Handcrafted Christmas: 200 decorations, gifs, cards and treats to make for a perfect Christmas by Alan D. Gear and Barry L. Freestone has lots of easy and not-too-difficult craft patterns and instructions. And they aren't tacky stuff. (This is not the right cover photo, but kind of looks like it.)

Christmas Gifts from the Kitchen by Jean Paré has a lot of cookie,
fudge and sauce recipes as well as instructions for making dry mixes
and gifts in a jar and some crafts and wrapping ideas.

Rick Steves' European Christmas is an informative book on traditions and history. Lots of photos, but not the relaxing read I was hoping for.

Between Heaven and Ground Zero, Hideaway, Safe Haven, Intervention

Between Heaven and Ground Zero: One Woman's Struggle for Survival and Faith in the Ashes of 9/11 by Leslie Haskin was the moving account of a woman who escaped from the 36th floor of Tower One and her ordeal and healing afterward. It was certainly interesting and I learned things I hadn't known before, but sometimes the writing seemed to jump from one topic to another without warning and there were scripture quotations that didn't seem to fit with the context. I had considered buying this book, but I'm glad I just borrowed it from the library.

Hideaway and Safe Haven by Hannah Alexander were nice light reading. They are medical romance novels set in a small lakeside town. Written by a husband and wife team.

Intervention by Terri Blackstock is about an 18-year-old drug addict who is on her way to rehab when the woman accompanying her is murdered. The girl is abducted and the police and her mother are frantically trying to find her. I enjoyed this book.

Obsessed, Saint, Sinner

Three more books by Ted Dekker. Obsessed goes back and forth between a concentration camp in WWII and California in the 1970s where the son of a Nazi is trying to find certain people who had been in the camp and a treasure. It's quite graphic and horrible in spots, but a better story than Saint and Sinner.

Saint and Sinner are part of the Showdown series. They are about a trained assassin and the brutal training he receives, his discovery of his supernatural gift of showing the truth, and two other people and their supernatural gifts.

Garden Style, 1001 Ideas

Better Homes and Gardens' Garden Style: Decorating Ideas for Indoors & Out was nicer than I had expected. The book is 10 years old, so some of the decorating ideas were dated, but a lot of them were classic and timeless. It was basically a picture book with paragraph captions.

1001 Ideas for Better Gardening by Pippa Greenwood. Although this book had a great deal of useful information, I didn't really like the way it was laid out. There was a theme for every page or two with bubbles of information on each subtopic.

Adam, Down to Earth

I found Ted Dekker's Adam a little on the scary side. It's about an FBI agent who is tracking a serial killer and gets killed and resuscitated three times and in the end finds out that demon possession is a lot more real than he had thought.

Down to Earth Gardener by Suzy Bales was great. She goes through the different sections of her own garden, telling how it came to be, what's in it, how it works and so on. Interesting reading, great pictures (and lots of them!) and quite a bit of information on different plants. I'm sure I'll be getting this one from the library again another year.

King, Debt-Proof, Flat Belly, Encyclopedia of Crafts, Any Minute

Arthur King of the Middle March was the final book of the trilogy by Kevin Crossley-Holland. I was much like the first two, just more. A look into life in the middle ages. I'm glad it was the last one though; it was enough.




Debt-proof your marriage : how to achieve financial harmony by Mary Hunt is a great book! I have it out from the library for the second time. I think it teaches the same financial principles and methods as her other book, Debt-Proof Living.

Flat belly diet! cookbook : 200 new MUFA recipes by Liz Vaccariello. I had already read The Flat Belly Diet and really, that was the book I wanted to read again. I think there are some good recipes in this one too, but the method is in the other one. I don't know if it works because I haven't tried it.

Martha Stewart's encyclopedia of crafts : an a-to-z guide with detailed instructions and endless inspiration by Martha Stewart. Loved it! Includes a great variety of crafts, the notable exception (to me, at least) being sewing.

Any Minute by Joyce Meyer was much better than her other novel that I read, The Penny. It's about a driven businesswoman who has a near-death experience that changes her life. Well-written and interesting.

One Month to Live

When I look at the night sky and see the work of Your fingers— the moon and the stars You set in place— what are mere mortals that You should think about them, human beings that You should care for them? Yet You made them only a little lower than angels and crowned them with glory and honor. (Psalm 8:3-5)

In 1995 scientists pointed the Hubble Space Telescope into an empty patch of black space about the size of a grain of sand just above the handle of the Big Dipper. They wanted to test the clarity and range of the Hubble and were shocked when the pictures came back. That little patch of empty space wasn't empty at all. The pictures revealed over a thousand previously unknown galaxies. Scientists now estimate there are more than 125 billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each one of those galaxies contains millions of stars. It's mind-boggling! My little finite mind can't even begin to grasp such magnitude. If this is the size of only what we know of creation, then how much greater must the Creator be? How much power and imagination must He possess in order to craft such beauty, force, and complexity?

Edwin Conklin, professor of biology at Princeton University, says that the probability of life origination from an accident is comparable to the probability of a dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory. It takes a lot more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in God.

God says to us, "You are so valuable to Me. You are worth so much to Me that I came to this earth, and I died for you. That's how valuable you are. You're worth dying for. I love you that much."

From One Month to Live by Kerry & Chris Shook

Beyond all comparison

"For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 

"For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison."

2 Corinthians 4:11, 17

Eighth Shepherd by Thoene

This is the eighth book in the A.D. Chronicles series by Brock & Bodie
Thoene. It's the story of Zacchaeus told from the viewpoints of
Zacchaeus (Zachai) and a woman who was healed of leprosy and works in
Zacchai's fig grove. It is an interesting, well-written story as all
the Thoene books are.

It's All About Him by Denise Jackson

It's All About Him: Finding the Love of My Life is the story of the marriage of Country singer Alan Jackson and his wife Denise. She tells how she was a weak, needy person, completely dependent on Alan's strong personality for any feeling of self-worth. After about 18 years, he left her. She tells how her relationship with God grew until she realized that it was all about Him, not Alan and not her. After a number of months, they got back together, got counseling, made changes, and came through on the other side stronger and more in love. I thought this was a great book and would highly recommend it.

The Island of Dr. Moreau, War of the Worlds

I love reading classics. These two books by H. G. Wells are science fiction from the 1890s. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dr. Moreau lives on a tiny Polynesian island and does surgery on animals trying to make them into humans with, as might be expected, rather horrible results. In the end, they kill Dr. Moreau, his assistant, and most of themselves.

In War of the Worlds, Martians invade the earth (they land near London) and kill many p eople. Everyone panics because guns and bombs don't work against them. Eventually, the Martians succumb to bacterial infections and everyone who's still alive celebrates and goes home again. I enjoyed reading these two books but wouldn't want a steady diet of this kind of stuff.

The Seeing Stone, Crossing Places, 100 Ways

Arthur: The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland

I had read Gatty's Tale by the same author so I was interested in more. This story is really about life in the middle ages and includes many of the legends of King Arthur. It is the story of a boy named Arthur and a man called Merlin who gives him a magic stone in which he can see things happening.

Arthur at the Crossing Places by Kevin Crossley-Holland, the second book in a series of three.

More about Arthur, what he sees in his stone, his desire to become a knight one day and the girls he likes. These books have a great deal of interesting details about life in those days.

100 Ways to Simplify Your Life by Joyce Meyer

This might be a good book for some people, but it sure didn't do anything for me.

Abomination and Lonestar Sanctuary

by Colleen Coble

This one was about a woman being stalked by a serial killer who leaves the bodies at geocaching sites. It was a good book, not too scary (too scary for me would be Frank Peretti's latest ones. I stopped reading his books after The Visitation; they kept getting scarier), but still moved at a good pace. I was a little disappointed that I didn't even have a clue who the real killer was. Isn't the author supposed to give you at least a clue? I guessed the totally wrong people. Recommended.

Another story about a woman being stalked by a killer, but the setting was completely different. This one was not scary at all (for me, anyway), I really enjoyed it. It was much more romantic than Abomination. Oh, and I had a pretty good idea who the killer was this time.

Final Justice, Gardening Weekends, Blink, Unbridled Dreams

Final Justice by Marta Perry was the sequel to my last blog post. It
was much the same and the story ended happily ever after. Good for
light reading if you're trying to rest your brain. Which was what I
wanted.

Better Homes & Gardens Gardening Weekends was not really what I was looking for. I was hoping for inspiring pictures and this book had lots of pictures and lots of words, most of which I didn't read, and did not inspire me in the least.

I loved Ted Dekker's book, Blink. It was fast-paced with police chases and stuff and definitely not a brain-rest book. It also goes into what a Muslim woman/wife's life is like. One theme through the book was the question of God's existence and the arguments on both sides were interesting, but kind of assume that God thinks like a human — which He does not! (Isaiah 55:8) I highly recommend this book. My husband (who does not read much fiction) is really enjoying it too.

Unbridled Dreams by Stephanie Grace Whitson is set in the 1800's and is about a girl whose mother wants her to be an accomplished lady but she wants to be a trick rider in a cowboy show. Secrets come out and they find that their dreams aren't quite as opposite as they seemed. This was a nice story and I've passed the book along to my mother; I think she would like this one.

A Face in the Shadows

By Lenora Worth

This story is a romantic murder mystery involving a divorced single mom, her mother and friends, her young son, a man who writes superhero comic books, and a mysterious woman who wears a hat and dark glasses. Can you guess who the murderer is?

I found out at the end of the book that there is a sequel (by another author) and, because of some missing information throughout the story, I gather that there was a prequel too. The sequel is Final Justice by Marta Perry.