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#1 Joy For Beginners Easy read about a bunch of friends challenged to do things that scare them as picked by their friend who just went thru a bout with cancer. Nothing crazy; one of the tasks is "learn to bake bread." 3/5

#2 Darkfever Figured I'd give this series a try as Moning was recommended by a few friends. I tried to like it, I really did. Mac just rubs me the wrong way and the "attraction" between her and Jericho is underdeveloped considering they had a whole book. As a result, I'm feeling really underwhelmed with the whole thing. 2.5/5

#3 The Case Files of Thomas Carney This is a teeny little book at 137 pages - just the right size to read on nook while on lunch at work. Pleasantly surprised by this one. Tom gets plopped into being a private investigator in the Afterlife and meets some really odd folk and really scary folk while investigating his first case. Considering he was a teacher while alive, the learning curve is part of the story. There are some folk who appear then disappear, but that's probably because the back of the book says it's the first in a planned series. Maybe they come back later. Nifty little action/mystery/paranormal/dry humor book for those who like any of those genres. 4/5

#4 The Last Werewolf Finally! A werewolf story where they act like wolves! (Sorry - Twilight and Harry Potter backlash there) As such, graphic when it comes to the eating and sex so not for everyone. And some of the reviews I read had issues with the language (use of the c-word pretty frequently). I just kept reminding myself that colloquialisms are different in other parts of the world. Beyond that, I thought the merge of wolf/human mentalities was done well. Action/secret agency storyline - meh. 4/5

#5 Reunion Sounded like a great idea - and timely, too - as survivors of a school shooting decide to have a 20th reunion to acknowledge their progress since the trauma. Spookiness ensues attributed to the ghost of the shooter. Flat, flat writing made it move slower than it could have, and the sudden segue into preachiness at the end...meh. That character didn't show up til 3/4 the way through and now he's got all the answers? 2/5

#6 Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks I like easily read non fiction and this almost fits the bill. Jennings really enjoys his footnotes which gets distracting after a few chapters. Each chapter is about a different facet of maps: geography bees, geocaching, map collectors, etc. It was a little difficult for me to stay engaged with the writing, so took me two weeks to finish (unheard of for me) at a chapter per night. 3/5

#7 Gap Creek Quick read about life in the Carolinas in the late 1800s. Not always a happy read, and I liked the fact everything's not tied up all neatly at the end. 3/5

#8 Bright Young Things Two small town girls go to New York during Prohibition - trials and learning experiences ensue. Good book, but not so much my type that I'll continue reading the series. 3/5

#9 The Night Circus Overhyped, but aren't they all these days? The magic Celia and Marco do is real and their creations for the circus range from whimsical to fantastical. It takes a while to set up the story before the circus and there's a little time skipping between some chapters, but it's not terribly hard to follow. A few things I'd wish had been explained a little more, but overall a good book. 4/5

#10 God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything Not everyone agrees with his opinions, but the man is an excellent writer. 3/5

#11 The Winds of Khalakovo Got this as a free selection on my nook, otherwise, probably wouldn't have picked this up on my own. It's fantasy of the epic vein, first in a planned trilogy I believe. You're dropped plunk in the middle of a developed world and figure out the whos and whats as you're reading. And it wouldn't be epic without the Russian influence for names... that took a while to get used to. If you're a fan of swords, sorcery, and magic, this might work for you. 3/5

#12 The Ninth Wife Would *you* marry someone who'd been married 8 times before? Interesting idea to me. The first half is backstory - alternating chapters of the whos and whys of Rory's marriages and how he and Bess met. Second half is road tripping time. Lots of little plot lines start popping up there and are mostly settled by the end even if I couldn't really figure out their pertinence to the story. 3/5

#13 The Wishing Trees Color me one big blubbery mess. Ian and Mattie go on the trip around Asia that they were supposed to do with wife/mom Kate. Shors is good at manipulating emotions, and I fell for it every time. I thought it was a good balance between mourning her loss and growing/healing while travelling. 4/5

On a side note, I have now decided that in addition to Gerry from P.S. I Love You, I would like Ian as well for my Christmas presents this year. :)

#14 The Strange Case of Finley Jayne I'm new to the steampunk genre and this was a short (78 pg) introduction. Good story, but I kept getting distracted by the "what is finley?" question. Hopefully my library has the next book in this series...

#15 The Baby Planner Gave this a chance as it has a 3.5 review on goodreads. As Valerie said in Princess Bride, "Lhi-ars!" The blurb is all warm and fuzzy, but within a few pages, Katie's husband is an ass (who only gets worse thru the book), and she's trying to get him drunk and poking holes in his condoms so she can get pregnant even tho he's adamant about not wanting kids. And then there's the random disease foisted upon her dad to set up a plot twist. I liked her clients and her family better than I liked her. 1.5/5 for the clients and family.

#16 Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses Well, after many weeks of reading this at the laundry, I have finished. I can appreciate the turning to yoga as a way to find something different in your life, but it really doesn't seem like she ever did learn anything new. It's just alternating chapters of the same themes. And the silly thing that bugged me was in the last chapter when she was still moaning about her weak core after C-sections. Really? After something like 5 or 6 years she never worked on it? Or was it just easier to blame her yoga difficulties on it? 2.5/ 5

#17 The Phantom of Pemberley: A Pride and Prejudice Murder Mystery Not generally a mystery reader, but this a neat little murder mystery set at Pemberley about a year after Elizabeth and Darcy marry. Bits of it dragged, but not so it made me want to give up. And the last few chapters are chock full of action as they discover the killer and give chase. 3/5

#18 Blood Song So this one surprised me. Started it at lunch at work today, and picked up where I left off after dinner. Just finished it. Lot of action, little bit of hanky panky but nothing overdone (looking at you, Laurell Hamilton....) and a neat finish to one story while setting you up for the next if you're interested. I wasn't expecting to get pulled in like I was, so I'm gonna have to go with 4/5.

#19 The Last Blind Date I don't understand the high reviews on this one. Everything just seemed glossed over to get to the next topic. I didn't hate it, so... 2/5

#20 The Gendarme Wow. This is a really good book. Emmett is 92 years old and due to a brain tumor, starts remembering the things he'd forgotten after a brain injury in WWI. What he remembers isn't necessarily good either as he was a gendarme during the Armenian relocation from Turkey. It switches between present and past, but isn't difficult to follow. Also sheds a little light on a genocide that's not nearly as well known as the Holocaust. 4/5

#21 The Trait (no cover) I should realize that the cheap and free ebooks on Barnes and Noble were there for a reason. Good premise, but repetitive. Something about the writing bugged me too - can't quite put my finger on it tho. 1/ 5

#22 Archangel Stayed up way too late this morning re-reading this one. Sharon Shinn did the angel/human fantasy in 1997 and I keep coming back to this series. This is one where the blurb isn't quite the book. Hard to explain without giving the whole thing away, but there's developing love, kidnapping, and lots of singing. Sounds like a bad musical when I put it that way, but it's not.:) 4/5

#23 Jovah's Angel So I dug out the other books in the series and obviously had a lazy afternoon since I finished #2. This one picks up 150 years after the first. Technology is being developed and not all of the changes are good ones, and the Archangel uncovers the truth about Jovah. 4/5

#24 Water Ghosts Interesting book about life for Chinese immigrants in 1920s California. I had to slow down with this one as there are no quotation marks used, so it took a second to determine if the sentence was speech, thought or part of the story. It seemed like it was done that way to make the whole story more ethereal since it was about ghosts, but it also seemed like it was trying too hard. Haven't figured out why some characters were introduced at all. 2/5

#25 The Mystery of Grace I've heard that deLint has some good books out there, but this is the first chance I've had to read one. Definitely a different take on a love story, with a little of the mystical and spiritual thrown in. Not a fan of the ending, but I'll live. 3/5

#26 Undressing the Moon The author crafts some beautiful imagery, but the book itself is a painful read as Piper just seems to have nothing but painful events in her life. Her brother and her friend provide the two bright spots in her life; everyone else lets her down. Definitely need to be a certain kind of reader for this story. 2/5

#27 The Alleluia Files Not quite as into this one as the first two, so it took me a little longer to get thru. This one jumps another 150 years ahead in the development of Samaria. 3/5

#28 Angelica 4/5

#29 Angel-Seeker 4/5

Well... finished that series just in time to clean my bookshelves and re-discover some of the other series I haven't read in years. Looks like I won't be at the library in a while... :)

#30 Starfarers One of the first series I read when I was giving science fiction a try. Some of the plot devices seem a little dated these days, but still a good book. As the first in the series, this one sets up a lot of the backstory for the next books. 3/5

#31 Skipping a Beat High school sweethearts marry, grow apart, and then grow closer after the hubby's heart stops for 4 minutes and he rethinks how he's living his life. Julia is a little hard to like as she seems overly concerned about losing her heated bathroom tiles, but then more is learned about her childhood and it makes more sense. Her inner discussions about love vs/money seemed right on - how much of one are *you* willing to give up for the other? The end seemed a little "wrapped up", but seemed appropriate for the story. 3/5

#32 Mockingjay I almost didn't read this. After the severe "meh" feeling caused by "Catching Fire," I'd given up on the series. My daughter kept nagging me to read "Mockingjay" telling me it was sooo much better. While buying my nook tablet, turns out they were giving away a free Hunger Games book with purchase, so ta dah!

It is much better than book 2 tho the violence level is ramped up accordingly. And the ending just kind of fizzled off into nothing - just a sad afterthought to what had been a good book. 4/5

#33 On the Island Crash on island, live there for 3 (or is it 4?) years, develop relationship - but only after boy is legal, get rescued by a tsunami (yep, a tsunami), go home, trials & tribulations, aw.. we really do love each other. Could have been done in much fewer pages than the 611 this took. 3/5

#34 Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion Picked this up on a whim at Barnes and Noble. Having visited some "tourist-approved" areas of China, I was interested to see how Levy's experiences would differ. Several of his experiences sounded similar to mine. The whole picking English names, for example. One of our guides told us his English name was Eragorn "for your convenience." Several of the older members of the group were pretty confused.

Oh yeah... the book. ;) Good armchair travelling here if you get a chance to pick it up. 3.5/5

#35 The Boy in the Suitcase I've been waiting for this one to be available at the library...finally! Got it yesterday and finished it today. Unlike The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's a lot less back story and history covered so it make the story go that much faster. Then again, that means there's no explanation about Nina's issues with time and running away until the end. You just have to accept those as quirks and keep reading.

Too bad it took 'Dragon Tattoo' for the U.S. market to discover Scandinavian writers - hopefully they'll expand beyond thrillers soon so that we can have even more good books to choose from. 4/5

#36 The Only Living Man With A Hole In His Head I like books about medical oddities, so I was really looking forward to this one. Holy missing editor Batman! Spelling and grammar errors and sentences that just randomly end without finishing the thought are found throughout the book (maybe it was just my ebook version, cos there were some formatting issues, too.) It really messes with the flow.

The story of Phineas is intriguing - how *did* he survive an iron bar through the brain?? - and the way he dealt with the changes that resulted. But the story seems to spend more time on the doctor that treated him. It's 70% doctor, 30% Phineas. It was a promising book, but not quite there for me. 2.5/5

#37 The Haunting of Maddy Clare ŷ������ ratings didn't lie to me! This one piqued my interest, and I managed to find it for cheap on the nook, and boy was I surprised. I'm normally cynical about angry ghost haunting stories, but this one didn't disappoint. Spookiness, mystery, a little romancin' and sexytimes in there to break up the investigations... a little of everything. I *did* guess the ending, but it didn't take away much from reading the characters' progress in coming to the same conclusion. 4/5

#38 The Scorpio Races Yay! A supernatural kinda-romance story that's *not* about vampires or werewolves. Thank you! Stiefvater puts water horses in a semi-modern setting without making them all cuddly. Some reviewers complained that nothing happened and I can see that - it doesn't have an action sequence every other chapter like some folk want. Still not sure I'll be reading her other books, but happy to have found an author with a different take. 3.5/5

#39 Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Yep, I'm shallow. I picked this up because there was a picture of a toddler holding hands with a chimpanzee on the cover. And the blurb. Instead, I got a book that tried to describe the author's mother's romanti-tragic existence in Africa, but always stopped just short of creating any real emotion. The British "stiff upper lip" she was raised with comes out in the writing. It was interesting reading about her mother's experiences but could have used some fleshing out. 2/5

#40 The Rebel Wife: A Novel Great blurb, so-so book. The mood is palpable, but I had a hard time connecting with any of the characters. 3/5

#41 The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible So Jewish guy decides to follow the Bible for a year and not just the well known guidelines, but also the blowing a horn at the beginning of the month and don't touch your wife when she's impure guidelines. I liked that he didn't have it all figured out right away or even at the end of his year. 4/5

#42An Available Man: A Novel Neat little book about a sixtyish gentleman dealing with the death of his spouse and starting to date again after (over a span of three years or so). Some dates work, some don't, but Wolitzer also doesn't ignore his emotions and the guilt he feels when he does finally fall in love. 3/5

#43 No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late A series of stories about her (mis)adventures while travelling - some amusing, some not so much. 3/5

#44 The Book of Madness and Cures Beautiful cover and.... well, the cover is pretty. The book starts of promising, but then just kind of shambles around after. It's about Gabriella going places while exploring her feelings without the resolution at the end that *I* prefer when reading this type of story. Because I'm a fan of the era and for fairly accurate history, this one is 3/5.

#45 The Flight of Gemma Hardy 2.5/5

#46Deadlocked I've learned to get these from the library rather than buy them. While not as disappointing as the last book, there is a lot more of the daily minutiae of Sookie's life, and a lot less of everyone else. It seems that everybody from the past 11 books gets thrown in for their brief re-introduction before the last book. Unfortunately, despite the energy of the earlier books in the series, the whole thing is just limping to the finish line now. 2/5

# 47 The Devil's Concubine Tho ŷ������ says the book is 450ish pages, my e-book came in at 1118! That's very intimidating when first starting a book. Lots of detail about the time periods, but hard for me to like the character Juliette. There's only so much "But I love him..." that I can take. Watching the evolution of her relationship with the angel was interesting, but I'm still trying to decide if the ending was a cop-out.
2.5/5

#48 The Orphan Master's Son It's a good book, but not worthy of all the hype. The first half is straightforward first person narrative, but the second half shifts between the perspectives of an interrogator, past experiences of Commander Ga and propaganda "bulletins" as heard over the loudspeaker. It took a little concentration reading it; I don't see how people could follow it in audiobook. 2.5/5

#49 Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Love her blog, and it's probably good that I do since it seems most of this is taken directly from the blog. She's hilarious, way outside of the box, and vulgar (for those who try to avoid that), but surprisingly relatable. 4/5

#50 Graveminder Slow, slow, slooooow. Took forever to set things up, then just whipped thru the resolution. Plus all kinds of plot points left unfinished... likely fodder for additional books. 2/5

#51 The Voluntourist: A Six-Country Tale of Love, Loss, Fatherhood, Fate, and Singing Bon Jovi in Bethlehem Picked this up because I've signed up for a volunteering stint on the other side of the world, and figured it would be a good idea to hear about someone else's experiences. Nice balance between his experiences and the people he works with. The thoughts about his personal life (father's death and childless marriage) sometimes fit where he put them and sometimes didn't, but didn't affect the flow of the book for me. Great armchair tourism. 4/5