Quote of the Day

"I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)” 
― E.E. Cummings

Quote of the Day

“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.” 
― Stephen King, Night Shift

Book Club Pick - October

My heart is racing and my palms are a little sweaty as I type this but I promised myself I would read It in the fall when it gets dark early so as to be properly scared. My Book Club selection this month is Stephen King's It. 

I bought It in February when I was on my Stephen King kick but every time I picked it up to read, I looked out my library window and saw the green electric box that sits across the street and I would imagine that psycho clown living in there and would be too afraid to read it. So this month, I'm facing my fears and reading It.  I really hate creepy clowns but it's daylight now so I can be brave and decide to read this, but come sundown I know I'm going to regret it.



Synopsis from Goodreads:

A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city's children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry's sewers once more

Quote of the Day

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” 
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

New Release Tuesday

Two books came out today that I'm really excited about and can't wait to get my hands on. John Sandford's next in the Virgil Flowers series, Mad River and Dennis Lehane's, Live by Night. 

I've been a fan of Sandford for years but Dennis Lehane is a recently discovered author for me. I loved the movie Mystic River and the book has been on my wishlist forever. I was at the bookstore Friday and picked up The Given Day. I'm halfway through it and love it. I'm fangirling on Lehane big time. Live by Night is the story of Joe Coughlin, only a minor character (so far) in The Given Day. 



Synopsis from Goodreads:
Bonnie and Clyde, they thought. And what’s-his-name, the sidekick. Three teenagers with dead-end lives, and chips on their shoulders, and guns.

The first person they killed was a highway patrolman. The second was a woman during a robbery. Then, hell, why not keep on going? As their crime spree cuts a swath through rural Minnesota, some of it captured on the killers’ cell phones and sent to a local television station, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to run them down. But even he doesn’t realize what’s about to happen next.



Synopsis from Goodreads:
BOSTON, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.

Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.

But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.

Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue

Outlander

Writing a review of Outlander is hard for me.  I loved this book and all of the subsequent books in the series with fierce intensity. I also feel like they are so personal that to write about them is baring myself a little bit. Crazy, I know, but true.

I saw a post on Facebook recently that said I wish I never read Outlander so I could read it for the first time all over again. Or something to that effect. In many ways I share the sentiment but Outlander  is also a book I never tire of picking up, it’s like coming home. This is my third reading of Outlander and I love it just as much as I did the first two times. My gut clenches, my heart hurts, and I laughed and internally swooned at all the same places.

Gabaldon has created two of the most intriguing, unique, captivating and utterly unforgettable characters in Claire and Jamie. Their story is of an epic love, so deep and so true they would go to the ends of the earth for each other – and do. Yet she makes them so real I like to believe somewhere, sometime Claire and Jamie did exist and maybe still do. I can never get enough of their story, the bonds of love bound so tenuously at first to a fierce and consuming passion for each other.

Outlander begins the story of Claire Beauchamp Randall on a second honeymoon in Scotland with her husband Frank. Separated by war, they have come here to renew their love. One day Claire inadvertently steps through the stone circle of Craigh na Dun and steps into 1743 Scotland and a group of Scottish Highlanders fighting off a band of English Dragoons.

Thus begins the tale of Claire and Jamie. Stuck in 1743 with little luck of returning to her time, Claire is kept with the Scots men and led to the Mackenzie lands and to the Castle of Leoch where the chieftain and his brother will try to figure out just who she is, where she will begin a friendship with a young Scot named Jamie and the course of her life is forever changed.

Outlander is not just a love story. There’s something for everyone. The historical detail within the series is incredible. Diana Gabaldon is a phenomenal researcher and she not only has the ability to write a breathtaking epic love story but she places it in context with the times and captures the heart of the unrest of 1743 Scotland. Every step of the journey feels real and Gabaldon creates a setting where you can imagine these characters once lived and maybe in some way, sometime, still do.

When I try to describe the awesomeness of Outlander, I always think of the scene in the movie The Princess Bride when the grandfather is telling his grandson what the book is about. There’s love, intrigue, outlawry, fighting, deception, Jacobites, an evil villain, witches, passion, unrest, family. The list goes on.

Claire is a modern woman, stuck in a time when women were not assertive and did not speak their mind. Intelligence in women was frowned upon and women knew their place. Claire is all of these and none of these, she’s assertive, she speaks her mind and she doesn’t depend on anyone when she can do the job herself. She’s compassionate and willing to risk herself for others.

Jamie is everything you want in a leading man. He’s gallant and strong, protective and even tempered (for the most part). He’s sensitive and unabashedly in love. The things that come out of Jamie’s mouth, the pure sweetness, well it’s better than eating chocolate. Not only does he have the Gaelic and speak with a Scottish brogue but he can slay the reader with his heartfelt feelings for Claire and the way he talks to her.  If I lived in that time, well I think I would need a snuff box because I would be swooning all the time.

There was one part that was difficult to get through and I still cringe on every re-read. I wish it could be wiped from my memory much as I imagine Jamie wishes the same but it’s there and it’s not going to change so like Jamie, I live with it.  There is another scene in which Jamie demonstrates he is from another time in his actions to Claire. While it may be difficult to understand in our time, this is a novel not about our time. These things happened and the scene puts into perspective that Claire is living in a different time where the same rules don’t apply. Jamie redeems himself in his vow to Claire and the scene gives Jamie even more depth. He showed Claire justice as he was taught and both Claire and the reader unravel another layer of Jamie.

For me, Outlander and the rest of the books are some of the best books I have ever read. I love these books with a fierceness of a mama bear. Just knowing they are sitting on a shelf in my library is comforting, that I can go in a pick one of them up at will, or even just look at them. After I finished the series the first time, I was bereft; I didn’t know what to do with myself. These books suck you in and grip you until you feel as though you are a part of the scenery, a casual observer of the life and times of Claire and Jamie and you believe somewhere, in some time, these lovers do exist and they are together, happy. 

Quote of the Day

“For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary. It is all. It is undying. And it is enough.” 
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander