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