Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?

Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love – all forgotten overnight.

Sounds fairly average so far right? Then the last two sentences:

And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story.

Welcome to Christine’s life.

Sounds thrilling – I can’t wait!

Of all the characters, the only one I actually liked was Nan. She raised her son Michael on her own after her husband committed suicide when Michael was 6. She’s having money troubles after her investments went sour and now she is renting out rooms in her house in Nantucket to try and raise some extra cash and avoid selling the house she loves so much. She’s a people person and a bit of a match maker and loves having a full house again.

Her son Michael was having an affair with his boss’ wife Jordana and having broken it off, she won’t leave him alone so he returns to Nantucket to get away. She turns up in Nantucket with the bombshell that she’s pregnant, turning his world upside down as he has now fallen for Daff – a woman staying in Nan’s house.

Daff is there because her husband cheated on her and her daughter Jess has gone to live with him so she’s on her own and wants to get away. Jess is causing major problems trying to get attention from her Dad now that he has a new girlfriend, and soon starts shoplifting to make herself feel better. When her Dad finds out, she is sent back to her mum in Nantucket. It turns out that all she needs is the new place and the new people and she’s a little angel again.

The other family is Bee and Daniel. They’ve just broken up after 6 years of marriage because Daniel has finally admitted that he’s gay. A little too late as they have 2 kids together. Things are (understandably) awkward between them until Bee’s dad is taken ill and the Daniel takes the kids in at Nan’s house to look after them. When Bee’s Dad is out of hospital, she brings him to Nantucket where we learn the biggest bombshell of them all. One that changes everything, first for the worst, then for the better.

I’ll not spoil the end of the book for you as it gets a bit juicy, but I did like the fact that we return to Nantucket a year later to wrap up the story, much better than leaving it hanging.

While I enjoyed the second half of the book, I didn’t like the fact that it took so long to set up all the background stories – perhaps it would have been better with fewer characters, but then there would have been less interweaving of all the stories, which is what I liked about the book. I also didn’t like the fact that most of the book revolved around affairs and marriages breaking up. Perhaps I’m an idealist or the maybe the book was aimed at women slightly older than me, but it wasn’t my favourite part of the storyline.

All in all, it was an enjoyable read, but for the reasons above, I’d only give it 3/5. Unusual for Jane Green as she’s one of my favourites.

Jane Green is one of my favourite authors, and one that is really easy to find in the charity shops in Pudsey, hence why this one looks a bit battered and old. I quite like books like this though, books that you know have been read and loved by the people who have read them before. And when they only cost 25p, can you really complain? I think not…

The part I enjoyed most about the book was that the descriptions were so detailed and immersed you completely in these mystical lands. You could almost believe you were in the forests or the  mountains along with Bilbo and the dwarves. I would imagine that it made it easier for Peter Jackson to direct the film because you get such a good feeling about the place from Tolkien.

I don’t really know why I didn’t feel any kind of connection to the book. It might be because this is not my usual genre, or maybe because it was written in the 1930′s and the style of writing was not what I’m used to, but I was disappointed in myself for not enjoying it as much as I thought I would.

I do still want to read the Lord of the Rings books, but maybe not for now. It took me way too long to read this, so I hate to think how long it would take me to read the trilogy if I attempted it now.

I’m going to give this book 3 stars for now, but I think I’ll read it again in the future and hopefully I’ll get on with it better.

But back to the reason for my blog post, MLB Europe posed this question on Twitter earlier:

If your favorite #MLB team switched rosters with its biggset rival, which team would you root for? Player love or team pride?!—
MLB Europe (@MLB_Europe) May 24, 2012

(If your favourite ‪MLB‬ team switched rosters with its biggest rival, which team would you root for? Player love or team pride?!)

It’s an interesting question because the players really make a team, so my first instinct was to say that I’d root for the players. But if you think about it more closely, the trade market in baseball is always so active that a team one year will almost certainly be different from the next, and two or three years down the line you might not even recognise it. It’s easy to get attached to the players on your team, but the chances are that unless you have a homegrown talent with a strong desire to play for the team, you’re going to lose him to a different team sooner or later.

There are players like Derek Jeter who are ‘franchise players’ and you know they’ll never leave, but most other players have a price – look at Prince Fielder, and more to the point, Albert Pujols. Both signed for new teams earlier this year and you wouldn’t have expected that to happen. So saying that you’d stick by your players is silly, because you’d eventually end up supporting every team in the league and it’d be a bit hard to keep up.

Another thing that would influence my decision is the fact that our biggest rival is the Detroit Tigers, and there are a lot of players on their team that I wouldn’t mind joining the White Sox; Justin Verlander, Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder to name a few. And who wouldn’t?! Of course, I’d rather have these three alongside my favourites like Konerko, Pierzynski, Floyd and Sale, but we all know that’s probably not going to happen!

So for me, it’s definitely Team Pride all the way. Players are a big part of a team, but there are many other factors too. I love the team, the coaches, the ballpark, the city and the history.  It would be hard to give all that up and switch to the team you’ve been programmed to hate.

So I’ll ask you the same question (if you’ve actually managed to read this far). Player love, or team pride? Leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts.

The gig was in a beautiful church in Islington called Union Chapel. It’s a proper working church during the day, and during the night it is used for gigs and shows. The stained glass with the setting sun was simply amazing. And being a church the acoustics were amazing.

I had seen tweets to say that Caggie Dunlop was going to be there, but she didn’t turn up. But that meant more Zach and Ron so I’m not going to complain. Zach kicked off the gig with his guitar, then played a few songs on the piano too. I love his albums, but he was wayyyy better live. I always love to feel the emotion in a song, and when Zach explained that he wrote Celia after seeing his Grandma hold her first Great Grandaughter just before she passed away made me listen a lot more closely to the words of the song. Amazing. He played a few songs I’d not heard of, and when I tweeted him after the show he told me about an old album that I’d not heard of, so that’s now playing on my iPod.

After Zach finished his set, it was over to Ron. I saw him a couple of times earlier this year when he played acoustic shows, but this time he was playing with a whole band. It was brilliant, especially when you consider that the band was put together by Ron’s tour manager and they’d never all played together until the day of the gig. When Ron was playing guitar, Zach played piano for him, and vice versa. Paul Hammer of the District also joined them for the show, which was pretty cool, especially when they all sung Somewhere in the Darkness as I wasn’t expecting any District songs.

The only bad part for me was that although we were in such a beautiful venue, other people clearly didn’t place quite as much importance on the fact that we were in a church. I know I’m not into fashion, but I really don’t want to see 15 year old girls wearing shorts so short that their butt is showing out the bottom. And definitely not when I’m sat in the pews of a church!

But by far the best part of the night was when Ron was about to play a song and said ‘hold on, I’ve got an idea’. He picked his phone up and started to call someone, which had us all a bit confused. It went to voicemail (typical!), and he left a message which said ‘Grandma, we’re about to play your song’. He held up the phone for everyone to say hi, then said ‘I love you‘ and hung up. He played Shoot out the Lights, then explained that he wrote the song when his Grandma had cancer and she asked him to write her a song. Luckily (and in Ron’s words), she ‘kicked cancer’s behind’. The phone call was really sweet, and you could tell that the song was quite hard for him to sing. The words of the song are so poignant now that I know why he wrote them:

We’ve been watching for a miracle
We’re praying for a sign
When the cure is made of poison then it’s hard to rest your eyes

If it’s time, Oh Lord
Shoot out the lights
Shoot out the lights

By far the best gig I’ve been to yet, even though it was a long weekend with a lot of driving – totally worth it!

Tonight felt like something really special. Thank you London.—
Ron Pope (@RonPopeMusic) May 20, 2012

I took my camera with me, but I didn’t get many pictures that I liked. I’ve added my favourites here, but I’m not very happy with them really.

These two geese were coming in to land on the water as I walked up towards the lake. Just managed to pull my camera out in time, but didn’t really get the focus right.

I thought this goose was nice and friendly until it started squawking loudly at any other duck that came near it…

And then it scared me to death when it did this and I managed to chop it’s feet off the bottom of the picture

Really pretty tiny flowers growing by the little stream that feeds into the lake

This little bird was so cute and didn’t mind me getting quite close, until I got a little too close and it flew away.

If you have any idea what the bird is, leave me a comment and let me know.

Even though I didn’t get up that early (I’ll use waiting for my Dad as an excuse), there was still some dew on these lovely looking leaves.

This spider terrified me, even though I’m sure spiders don’t have a habit of jumping a foot in the air…

I got a new camera lens today and I’m going to London at the weekend, so hopefully I’ll be able to try it out properly! It’s only a quick overnight stay to see Ron Pope, Zach Berkman and Caggie Dunlop with my brother, but I think we’re going to take a trip back to the Royal Air Force Museum on the way home.

My best friend Abi is a massive LOTR fan (and has been since I met her about 10 years ago), and with the film coming out later this year, I’ve booked the day off work to go see it with her. I hate seeing a film before I’ve read the book because I love to have my own ideas about how a person looks and make my own feelings of a place before my head is filled with the director’s version and I can’t get rid of it (as has happened with books like Harry Potter).

So I guess now is as good a time as any to read it, and I have Abi’s assurance that I’ll love it! I hope so, and you never know, my next post may be one telling you all that I’ve inadvisedly started reading The Fellowship of the Ring…

I’m not saying it was terrible, and I guess it must have been hard to write while still keeping everything confidential so his patients can still trust him, but there just wasn’t as much humour as I hoped there would be. The author has only been a GP for a few years, so I guess he’s not being going long enough yet to have hundreds of stories that he can call to mind, so maybe it would have been better if he’d waited a few years before he wrote the book.

This edition of the book had a special bonus of ‘additional chapters’, which you would think would be the funnier/more outrageous bits that he’d had to cut out of the first part of the book, but if I were him I probably wouldn’t have bothered including them.

There’s not much else really to say about this book except to move swiftly on and give it 1/5, which hasn’t happened often on here…

I never anticipated how hard it would be to read 100 books in a year, but it’s turning into quite a challenge! I’ve read 35 so far, but I’m still one book behind where I should be at this point. I’m still hopeful I’ll be able to get there though!

In any case, the book was very good even if it was pretty short (130 pages). It was written in 1936 and you can tell through the style of the writing. It made a refreshing change though from the books that I usually read, better writing and still just as much plot.

The book is about an insurance salesman called Walter who falls in love with a woman called Phyllis and sparks a plot to murder her husband and take the insurance money. They manage to pull off the murder with a complicated but very well thought out plan and everything seems to be going well until the insurance company decide not to pay out the money on the grounds that it wasn’t an accident, but either suicide or murder.

Walter then strikes up a friendship with Phyllis’ step-daughter Lola (the daughter of the poor murdered man), and finds out that Phyllis has previously murdered other people in order to get their money, including Lola’s mother. He realises that he can’t trust Phyllis to keep quiet about his involvement in the murder, so plots to kill her and make it look like an accident.

It’s another well thought out plan, but the one thing he didn’t consider was that Phyllis might try to kill him too. He ends up in hospital with a bullet in his chest, and it looks like Lola will take the blame for pulling the trigger. He has fallen in love with Lola and can’t stand the thought of her being incarcerated or hurt by the policemen, so tells the full truth about everything that has happened, in fact, it turns out that the entire book has been his confession letter.

His colleagues at the insurance company can’t risk the news getting out that one of their salesman was involved in the murder of a client to fraudulently claim the money, so they arrange for him to get on a ferry and run away. But little did he know that Phyllis would be on the ferry too. The book ends with Phyllis and Walter jumping off the side of the boat to their death to avoid being captured and handed in to the authorities.

A very strange book with an unexpected ending, but one that I enjoyed a lot. It was completely different to what I usually read, but I’ve had a lot of books like that since I started my reading challenge this year, and on the whole it’s been a good experience.

It’s part of a set of books I bought that have been made into successful films, and this one was apparently made in 1944 (the book was written in 1936). I’ve never seen the film (although I guess I probably should have), so I’m not really that sure what the book is about, but I’ve heard good things about it.

The book centres around a marine called Logan Thibault, who finds a picture of a woman in the middle of the desert in Iraq. After no-one claims it from the notice-board, he decides to keep it and it becomes a good luck charm.

*Spoiler alert – if you’re going to read this book or watch the film, don’t read any further!*

When he gets back from Iraq, he walks from Colorado to Hampton (North Carolina) to try and find this woman who has kept him safe. Surprisingly enough, he thinks it would be a bit creepy to tell her the truth, so instead he gets a job working for her Nana and gradually strikes up a romance with her.

Throughout the book, we are introduced to her ex husband Clayton, a rather overbearing man who likes to be in control, and is not pleased with the way his son has turned out (not sporty enough for his liking). He’s constantly controlling the situation and tries to get Logan to leave town. It doesn’t look to be working, until he finds out about the photo and goes running to tell Elizabeth the truth.

As you would expect, she goes mad when she finds out and tells Logan she wants him to leave. But, this being a Nicholas Sparks book, a chat with her Nana and a heart to heart with her son Ben brings her to her senses and everything is right back on track.

But not without one last hitch to spice up the end of the story. Clayton goes storming round to Beth’s house to confront her, and when Ben walks in on them, he runs out into a thunderstorm to his treehouse over the (now raging) creek. By the time Beth and Clayton catch up with him, he’s dangling in the water and hanging on to the rope ladder, but it soon becomes clear he can’t hold on much longer. Clayton dives in the water after him, but he’s not strong enough to help, and ends up in trouble too.

Just in time, Logan and his loyal dog Zeus come running up to the river bank and dive into the water. Zeus helps to drag Ben out, but it looks like Logan is struggling with Clayton and he ends up being pushed under the water. The last we know, his lungs are on fire and it looks like it might be the end…

The story then skips to two months later and all we know is that someone has died, but there is no indication as to who. There’s a horrible couple of pages where it looks like the book is going to end in completely the wrong way, but in typical Sparks style, we end up with a happy-ever-after ending.

I really needed this book after the last few I’ve read and not really enjoyed as much as normal. Really looking forward to seeing the film now (if I can persuade Cameron to go with me)!

The only bad thing about buying a book so close to the film coming out is that it is hard to find one with a nice cover. Instead, I’ve had to settle for one with Zac Efron and generic blonde woman (whatever her name is). I am a sucker for a book with a nice cover, but it’s whats on the inside that counts, so lets hope the book is good! Then I can drag Cameron to see the film with me (or at least I can try)!

For a start (and this may sound rather harsh), no-one died. For a murder mystery, you usually expect a bit of excitement at the start. Instead, we listen to half a book of plans for the wedding and having the new house renovated, most of which was not really book-worthy. There was the mysterious appearance of two of her fiancé’s friends, but that’s not too exciting (at least at the start).

Then when we get half way through the book we finally get to the wedding, and it seems like Harris just decided she couldn’t be bothered to write about it, as the entire wedding and honeymoon was detailed in less than two pages. For a book that has spent 100+ pages in the build up to the wedding, I found this very disappointing.

The book wasn’t all bad though, and after the non-wedding, the excitement starts building up as Aurora starts looking for the family that mysteriously went missing 7 years ago from the house she just bought. There’s drama at the end as Aurora once again makes the stupid mistake of entering the house of a murderer alone and you can guess what happens then!

I was definitely hoping for a better book than this, and it did leave me feeling a bit like I’d not read anything worthwhile. That’s the end of the omnibus for now, until I decide to buy the second part. Rather than being impatient to carry on reading the series, I’m actually glad to be having a bit of a break from it, which is not my usual impression of Charlaine Harris.

In this book, Aurora has started to shadow her mother at her real estate business, and it is while she is showing a house to the new man in town and his sister that they discover a woman dead in one of the bedrooms. Although this is supposedly a massive trauma, Aurora still can’t help falling for the man that she’s showing the house to, even though she’s already in a relationship with the local minister. Lucky for her though, the minister finds out that he can’t have children, which gives Aurora a quick get out so that she can start dating the new man – how convenient!

I didn’t particularly like this part of the storyline, I can see why she might want to break up with the minister, but there was no scene, they just said goodbye and that was it. I also don’t get why she would drop everything for this completely strange man that she’s just discovered a corpse with!

Obviously, this being a murder mystery book, Aurora has to get nosy and try to figure out who the murderer was, and when she finally figures it out, she goes out to his house alone to try and steal the evidence. This seemed odd to me; I know Harris wanted to create a big dramatic scene, but why would you try to steal the evidence from the murderers house? And not tell anyone you were going there? Cue the big scene, where Aurora is saved just in time by her new beau, but unfortunately not before she is beaten so badly she lands herself in hospital.

And wouldn’t you just know it, she wakes up in hospital with an engagement ring on her finger…

There’s another 5 books in this series, so I can’t see everything working out quite to plan! Especially not with Harris as the author. The next book is called The Julius House, hopefully it’s better than this one was!

This book starts off a few months down the line from the end of the first one, and the first couple of chapters catch you up with everything that’s happened. Aurora has very luckily (or unluckily) been left a house and over $500,000 by one of the volunteers she works with at the library. It comes as quite a shock to her as they were not very good friends, but she soon settles with the idea.

That is, until she finds a skull hidden in the window seat of the house. She’s desperate to find out who it belongs to and conflicted about whether dear old Jane could actually have killed somebody, but then there is the harsh reality that someone else is looking for the skull too.

Somewhere in between her dates with the Vicar and working at the library, she starts digging around Jane’s things and getting to know her neighbours a bit better. There’s a dramatic scene at the end as we find out who the murderer was, while Aurora’s ex-boyfriend’s Wife is simultaneously having a baby and pointing a gun at the culprit to stop them from killing Aurora.

All’s well that ends well though, as Aurora decides to put Jane’s house up for sale and buy herself her own place with her small fortune, and she also receives a call from her old friend Robin Crusoe (yes, really), who she met under unfortunate circumstances in the first book – finding a dead body the first time you meet someone is not exactly the best introduction!

I think another 4/5 for this book, it would have been better if it was a little longer, and if there was more attention on the main plot than on the day to day activities like cleaning the house and doing the shopping. The next book is called Three Bedrooms, One Corpse. It’s another short book, which makes me very glad that this series is actually 8 books long, especially now I’m getting to know the characters a bit more.

You could really tell that this was one of her earlier books though (written in 1990), as the writing was less descriptive and the story slightly less developed than her other books that I’ve read. Saying that though, it was still a very well written book, and I couldn’t put it down once I’d started.

The story is about a small-town woman called (you guessed it) Aurora Teagarden. She’s a member of a group called ‘Real Murders’, a rather odd group of people who meet once a month to talk about historical murders and discuss the case and the culprit. That is, until one of the group is murdered before the start of one of the meetings and other people within the group start dropping like flies.

It’s a race against time to find the murderer before other people are killed. What makes the murders more strange is that they are all based on murders that have been discussed in the group, so it’s almost a certainty that it is one of the group that is responsible.

The story builds up and up until a dramatic couple of chapters at the end where we find out who the murderer is, and it’s not who you are led to suspect for the whole of the book, it really shocked me!

I think I’ll give this book 4 out of 5, if only because I’m comparing the book to other Charlaine Harris books that I’ve read and it wasn’t quite as good. If you’ve read this, would you agree?

Next up is the second book in the series, A Bone to Pick. I look forward to getting to know Aurora a little more, and as it’s set in a small town I’m anxious to see who will die next…

I wouldn’t be able to decide which Charlaine Harris series is my favourite so far (Lily Bard, Harper Connelly or Sookie Stackhouse), but I’m sure I won’t be disappointed by this one.

I could tell from the book that we’re supposed to feel sorry for Charlotte with the stress that she’s under, and the trouble in her life (like her crappy boyfriend and her supposed allergies to pretty much everything), but I just didn’t feel that. To me, the book felt like one complaint after another from a stuck up, spoilt girl who’s completely lost touch with reality. I spent most of the book wishing she’d shut up whining and just get on with what you know was going to happen in the end anyway (i.e. fall in love with the ‘nice guy’ and live happily ever after).

The storyline of the book is supposed to be that she somehow meets her 21 year old self, and realises that she can change the course of her life by influencing her actions of 10 years before. The book does manage to keep a tenuous grasp on reality in that everything she tries to change manages to fail and ends up happening just as it was going to anyway. But this storyline felt like it wasn’t even necessary to the book and wasn’t very well developed. Most of the drama (and complaining) came from when she was her 31 year old self, so the whole “I’ve met my 21 year old self” part of the book was just like a distraction.

As you can tell, I didn’t really enjoy this book, although I read it through to the end because I don’t really like to leave a book half finished. A definite 1/5 rating for this book, which is a shame because I really liked the last book I read by Alexandra Potter.