New Release Tuesday #25: January 26, 2016

Hello dear Readers,

This week a Novel. A book that is called one of the best books of 2015. I have read and heard so many great things about it. Have not had the chance to read it but I hope I can do it soon. Releasing in Paperback today, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.

Title: A Little Life

Genre: Women's Fiction-General Fiction

Author: Hanya Yanagihara

Publisher: Anchor
Publication Date: January 26, 2016 Paperback

Language: English

Paperback: 832 pages
Meet the Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Wall Street Journal • NPR • Vanity Fair •Vogue • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • O, The Oprah Magazine • Slate • Newsday • Buzzfeed • The Economist • Newsweek • People • Kansas City Star• Shelf Awareness • Time Out New York • Huffington Post • Book Riot • Refinery29 • Bookpage •Publishers Weekly • Kirkus

WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE
A MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.

Wendy.

Upcoming Release #8: The Passenger by Lisa Lutz

Hello dear Readers,

Coming up on March 1, 2016, a Mystery. The Passenger by Lisa Lutz. One of my most anticipated new releases of 2016. 

Title: The Passenger

Genre: Mystery & Thrillers

Author: Lisa Lutz

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: March 1, 2016

Language: English

Hardcover: 320 pages
Meet the Author: Lisa Lutz
Buy Me: Amazon 

Book Description

From the author of the New York Times bestselling Spellman Files series, Lisa Lutz’s latest blistering thriller is about a woman who creates and sheds new identities as she crisscrosses the country to escape her past: you’ll want to buckle up for the ride!

In case you were wondering, I didn’t do it. I didn’t have anything to do with Frank’s death. I don’t have an alibi, so you’ll have to take my word for it...

Forty-eight hours after leaving her husband’s body at the base of the stairs, Tanya Dubois cashes in her credit cards, dyes her hair brown, demands a new name from a shadowy voice over the phone, and flees town. It’s not the first time.

She meets Blue, a female bartender who recognizes the hunted look in a fugitive’s eyes and offers her a place to stay. With dwindling choices, Tanya-now-Amelia accepts. An uneasy―and dangerous―alliance is born.

It’s almost impossible to live off the grid today, but Amelia-now-Debra and Blue have the courage, the ingenuity, and the desperation, to try. Hopscotching from city to city, Debra especially is chased by a very dark secret…can she outrun her past?

With heart-stopping escapes and devious deceptions, The Passenger is an amazing psychological thriller about defining yourself while you pursue your path to survival. One thing is certain: the ride will leave you breathless.

Wen

New Release Tuesday #24: January 19, 2016

Hello dear Readers,

This week a piece of Women's Fiction. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald. Releasing today The Readers of Broken Wheel is a fantastic story about friendship, hope and love for books and what books can do for people. An enjoyable and comforting read which I totally recommend.

Title: The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Women's Fiction-General Fiction

Author: Katarina Bivald

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Publication Date: January 19, 2016 Paperback

Language: English

Paperback: 400 pages
Meet the Author: Katarina Bivald
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

The International Bestseller

Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen...

Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her book-loving pen pal. When she arrives, however, she finds Amy's funeral guests just leaving. The residents of Broken Wheel are happy to look after their bewildered visitor ― not much else to do in a small town that's almost beyond repair. They just never imagined that she'd start a bookstore. Or that books could bring them together – and change everything.

There's a book for every person ... and a person for every book.

My Thoughts

Sara, a young woman form Sweden meets her book pen-pal Amy who lives in a town in Iowa called Broken Wheel. Sara stars a bookstore and books change people's lives in this small town.

When I first read the description I was fascinated and intrigued to know more about Sara and the impact her love for books would cause in Broken Wheel. That and the fact that we are book lovers, bookworms, it is always good to read a book about books. In terms of the story I love how is it presented, how we can see what books can do for people, how books can help people.I love the characters, their stories, and could relate and believe in them. As for the book, I like the author's writing style and her ability to touch subjects such as the human condition, love, friendship and books. 

Overall, a fun, beautiful, sweet and enjoyable story which I totally recommend.

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark and Netgalley for sending this book in exchange for an honest review.  Also thank you for inviting me to join the Book Tour.

Wendy.

BOOK TOUR: Book Review: The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald /Women's Fiction-Geneal Fiction/NETGALLEY ARC

Hello dear Readers,

Today I would like to share my book review of The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald. Releasing Tuesday January 19, 2016 The Readers of Broken Wheel is a fantastic story about friendship, hope and love for books and what books can do for people. An enjoyable and comforting read which I totally recommend.

Title: The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

Genre: Women's Fiction-General Fiction

Author: Katarina Bivald

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Publication Date: January 19, 2016 Paperback

Language: English

Paperback: 400 pages
Meet the Author: Katarina Bivald
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

The International Bestseller

Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen...

Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her book-loving pen pal. When she arrives, however, she finds Amy's funeral guests just leaving. The residents of Broken Wheel are happy to look after their bewildered visitor ― not much else to do in a small town that's almost beyond repair. They just never imagined that she'd start a bookstore. Or that books could bring them together – and change everything.

There's a book for every person ... and a person for every book.

My Thoughts

Sara, a young woman form Sweden meets her book pen-pal Amy who lives in a town in Iowa called Broken Wheel. Sara stars a bookstore and books change people's lives in this small town.

When I first read the description I was fascinated and intrigued to know more about Sara and the impact her love for books would cause in Broken Wheel. That and the fact that we are book lovers, bookworms, it is always good to read a book about books. In terms of the story I love how is it presented, how we can see what books can do for people, how books can help people.I love the characters, their stories, and could relate and believe in them. As for the book, I like the author's writing style and her ability to touch subjects such as the human condition, love, friendship and books. 

Overall, a fun, beautiful, sweet and enjoyable story which I totally recommend.

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark and Netgalley for sending this book in exchange for an honest review.  Also thank you for inviting me to join the Book Tour.

Wendy.

Books I Really Want To Read In 2016

Hello dear Readers,

Today I want to share with you some of the books I really want to read this 2016. I will leave the links to Amazon on each title and a brief description (taken from Amazon as well).

• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

A GAME OF THRONES

A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE: BOOK ONE

 

Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister forces are massing beyond the kingdom’s protective Wall. To the south, the king’s powers are failing—his most trusted adviser dead under mysterious circumstances and his enemies emerging from the shadows of the throne. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the frozen land they were born to. Now Lord Eddard Stark is reluctantly summoned to serve as the king’s new Hand, an appointment that threatens to sunder not only his family but the kingdom itself.

Sweeping from a harsh land of cold to a summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, A Game of Thrones tells a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; a child is lost in the twilight between life and death; and a determined woman undertakes a treacherous journey to protect all she holds dear. Amid plots and counter-plots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, allies and enemies, the fate of the Starks hangs perilously in the balance, as each side endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

Unparalleled in scope and execution, A Game of Thrones is one of those rare reading experiences that catch you up from the opening pages, won’t let you go until the end, and leave you yearning for more.

• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. 

A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning novel

A New York Times Top-Ten Book of 2004

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Nearly 25 years after Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." GILEAD tells the story of America and will break your heart.

• The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women.

 

Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world—and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection.

Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.

As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.

Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.

This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.

• A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

“HOW COULD YOU, A MATHEMATICIAN, BELIEVE THAT EXTRATERRESTRIALS WERE SENDING YOU MESSAGES?” the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” came the answer. “So I took them seriously.” 

Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who—thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community—emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize for triggering the game theory revolution. The inspiration for an Academy Award–winning movie, Sylvia Nasar’s now-classic biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over adversity, and the healing power of love.

• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love--and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

Wen

New Release Tuesday #23: January 12, 2016

Hello dear Readers,

This week a piece of Women's Fiction. My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout.

Title: My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel

Genre: Women's Fiction

Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publisher: Random House

Publication Date: January 12, 2016

Language: English

Hardcover: 208 pages
Meet the Author: Elizabeth Strout
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is cause for celebration. Her bestselling novels, including Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, have illuminated our most tender relationships. Now, in My Name Is Lucy Barton, this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all—the one between mother and daughter.
 
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. 

Wen

Book Haul-November/December 2015

Hello dear Readers,

This is my book Haul for the months of November and December 2015. I read a couple of them already and looking forward to read the rest. The Harry Potter illustrated edition is gorgeous, have to say is the most beautiful book I own. I also purchased a few e-books and received ARC's for review.

Book Haul

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Illustrated Edition.
• I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson.
• Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris.
• November 9 by Colleen Hoover.
• Concussion by Jeanne Marie Laskas.
• Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.
• Point of Retreat by Colleen Hoover.
• Juego de Tronos by George R.R. Martin.
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.
• The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks.
• See Me by Nicholas Sparks.

Wen

New Release Tuesday #22: January 05, 2016

Hello dear Readers,

This week another Thriller. What I tell you in the Dark by John Samuel.

Title: What I Tell You In The Dark

Genre: Thriller-Mystery

Author: John Samuel
Publisher: The Overlook Press

Publication Date: January 05, 2016

Language: English

Hardcover: 256 pages
Meet the Author: John Samuel
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

A business executive with damaging secrets about his company, driven to bring the truth to light, finds his actions have unexpected and mortal consequences in this daringly original debut novel about what it means to be human

A nameless angel has been out of God’s favor since things went wrong with his last mission, 2,000 years ago. He has spent the intervening millennia watching the humanity he so loves fall into moral disrepair. Lately, he's been watching Will, a businessman attempting to expose his company's dark dealings to the press. Will's campaign is not going well.

In a moment of weakness and bravado, the angel decides to take over Will--"jumping in" as he did over two millennia ago. What follows is a mortal struggle between good and evil, as cosmic forces fight to maintain the status quo. As Will begins to lose his grip on himself and his mission, the reader is forced to question whose reckoning this is: Are these the delusions of a man crushed by the hypocrisies of modern society? Or the actions of an angel desperate to right our wrongs?

Powerfully written, fast paced, and perfect for fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joe Hill, and Bret Easton Ellis,What I Tell You in the Dark is an unsettling story of omnipotence, mayhem, capitalism, and corruption―a violet struggle between intentions and their consequences played out on a grand scale.

Wen

Reading Challenges for 2016

Hello dear Readers,

For 2016 I have decided to complete a Reading Challenge I saw in the Idaho Writers Guild Website. I will leave the list down below.

And as the last 4 years, I will be participating in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I set up my goal to 80 books in 2016.

2016 Reading Challenge

• A book published this year.
• A book you can finish in a day.
• A book you have been meaning to read.
• A book recommended by your local librarian or bookseller.
• A book you should have read in school.
• A book chosen for you by your spouse, partner, sibling, child, or BFF.
• A book published before you were born.
• A book that was banned at some point.
• A book you previously abandoned.
• A book you own but have never read.
• A book that intimidates you.
• A book you have already read at least once.

2016 Goodreads Reading Challenge

• 80 books

Wen