Our New Read

Monique picked our new read for November. It is Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Here is what it is about:

Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics, and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat, including an epic air battle that ended when his plane crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half the crew seriously wounded.

On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea, leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft. Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high. At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it, unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking nearby. Louie’s journey had only just begun.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? So, check your local library, borrow it from a friend or you can purchase it on Amazon for $13.49 here's a link: http://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-World-Survival-Resilience-Redemption/dp/1400064163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319158697&sr=8-1 Happy reading!

A Late teaser Cecilia

     A wave of emotions, a mixture of angers and longings, washed over Mack and as if on cue his father's colors burst from across the meadow and enveloped him.  He was lost in a wash of ruby and vermillion, magenta and violet, as the light and color whirled around and embraced him.  And somehow, in the middle of the exploding storm, he found himself running across the meadow to find his father, running toward the source of the colors and emotions.  He was a little boy wanting his daddy, and for the first time he was not afraid.  He was running, not caring for anything but the object of his heart, and he found him.  His father was on his knees awash in light, tears sparkling like a waterfall of diamonds and jewels into the hands that covered his face.
   "Daddy!" yelled Mack, and threw himself onto the man who could not even look at his son.  In the howl of wind and flame, Mack took his father's face in his two hands, forcing his dad to look him in the face so he could stammer the words he had always wanted to say:  "Daddy, I'm so sorry! Daddy, I love you!"  The light of his words seemed to blast darkness out of his father's colors, turning them blood red.  They exchanged sobbing words of confession and forgiveness, as a love greater than either one healed them.

                                                                  The Shack by William P. Young

This book was a challenge for me to read.  The first part read pretty good and then came the part where Mack went to the shack and met God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost.  It is how the author portrayed them that I had to work through.  I did enjoy the book, I just have to realize that the world looks on religion different that I do and be open minded.

Our New Read

Shelly picked our new read for the month of October. It is The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. Here is what it is about:

Journalist Coyle travels the world to discover the truth about talent in this fascinating account that studies how individuals can unlock their full potential and bring their talents to light. The discoveries put forth by Coyle come down to three main elements: coaching, motivation and practice. While these hardly seem like breakthroughs, Coyle's discovery process proves fascinating. Providing detailed examples from a variety of different sources, Coyle's work becomes as motivational as the stories he presents.

Sound interesting? Pick up a copy at the library, borrow it from a friend, or you can buy it online at Amazon, or some other online seller. Happy reading!

Cecilia's Teaser Tuesday

All of a sudden, every ounce of hope she still harbored within her ran out.  In the old lady's eyes she read what she most dreaded.  Michel was dead.  Dead in the cupboard.  She knew.  It was too late.  She had waited too long.  He had not survived.  He had not make it.  He had died there, all alone, in the dark, with no food and no water, just the bear and the storybook, and he had trusted her, he had waited, he had probably called out to her, screamed her name again and again, "Sirka, Sirka, where are you!"  He was dead, because of her.  If she had not locked him up that day, he could have been here, right now, she could be bathing him now, this instant.  She should have watched over him. she should have brought him here to safety.  It was her fault. It was all her fault.

The girl crumple to the floor, a broken being.  Wave after wave of despair washed over her.  Never in her short life had she know such acute pain.  "she felt Genevieve gather her close, stroke her shorn head, murmur words of comfort.  She let herself go, surrendered herself completely to the kind old arms that encircled her.  Then she felt the sweet sensation of a soft mattress and clean sheets enveloping her.  She fell into a strange, trouble slumber.


Sarah's Key   By Tatina De Rosnay

Cecilia's Teaser Tuesday

Yes! let me acknowledge that on this first day I let the charm of her presence lure me from the recollection of myself and my position.  The  most trifling of the questions that she put to me, on the subject of using her pencil and mixing her colours; the slightest alterations of expression in the lovely eyes that looked into mine with such an earnest desire to learn all that I could teach, and to discover all that I could show, attracted more of my attention than the finest view we passed through, or the grandest changes of light and shade as, they flowed into each other over the waving moorland and the level beach.  At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it.  No uninstructed man or woman possesses it.

Kori's Teaser Tuesday

My grandfather had described it a hundred times, but in his stories, the house was always a bright, happy place---big and rambling, yes but full of light and laughter. What stood before me now was no refuge from monsters, but a monster itself, staring down from its perch with vacant hunger. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virus--as if nature itself had waged war against it---but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.

I gathered up what scrawny courage I had and waded through waist-high weeds to the porch, all broken tile and rotting wood, to peek through a cracked window. All I could make out through the smeared glass were the outlines of furniture, so I knocked on the door and stood back to wait in eerie silence, tracing the shape of Miss Peregrine's letter in my pocket. I'd taken it along in case I needed to prove who I was, but as a minute ticked by, then two, it seemed less and less likely that I would need it.

Liz's Teaser Tuesday

"Station is the paradox of the world of my people, the limitation of our power within the hunger for power. It is gained through treachery and invites treachery against those who gain it. Those most powerful in Menzoberranzan spend their days watching over their shoulders, defending against the daggers that would find their backs. Their deaths usually come from the front." -Drizzt Do'Urden-

Homeland by R.A. Salvatore