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.