Book Reviews

A few quick reviews for you of some of the books I completed April and May.

Six of the books were from The Spirit of Simple Living Series published by Guideposts. I've read a few of these books before and have had them on the bookshelf for several years, so I decided to read through them all as I make plans for the summer and enjoy being back to my "regular" schedule now that school has ended. These books are pretty easy reads and packed with great information - the two I most enjoyed were The Simple Home with ideas for simplifying your home and making it work for you and your family and Healthy Living since this is one of the things I'm really focusing on lately. I also read Simply You, Finding The Time, Simple Friendships, and Kinship and Community.

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks has been in my to-read pile for a while. In this story, a US Marine (Logan Thibault) finds a photo while serving in Iraq. After his tour of duty is over, he ends up walking across the country to find the girl in the photo. When he meets her, however, he doesn't tell her about the photo, they fall in love, she finds out & is angry . . .  but by that time they are in love. There's a jealous, perverted ex-husband, a somewhat "nerdy" son who's an excellent chess player & overall good kid, Logan Thibault's dog Zeus, and Nana who tells it like it is. This is a great story with a few twists and turns and a satisfying ending despite tragedy along the way. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the book: sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.

These next three books I read on my Kindle. As I read more and more books on Kindle, I've discovered that some books work better than others in that format. For me, fiction books are great on the e-reader, however non-fiction don't seem to flow as well because I can't easily flip back to a page or check something I've highlighted (although I understand this can be done on the Kindle if I take time to learn to use it proficiently!).

I don't remember where I heard about 42 Days to Fit, but I remember downloading it free from the Kindle store as part of my initiative to read books on healthy living. This book was written primarily for moms trying to lose baby fat (so obviously some of the information was irrelevant), however there were food & exercise challenges each week and some good advice along the way.  There were also links to videos and recipes, however to me that disrupts the flow of reading so I didn't visit any of the links.

On Becoming a Writer: What Every Blogger Needs to Know by Denise J. Hughes was another free download for the Kindle. This book contained good basic information about writing, but this is one I felt like I would have liked better in a paper format.


I also read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsbysince it's been years since I've read it and we just might decide to check out the new movie soon. This was a good book for the Kindle because it's fiction, not too long, and was a free download (do you see a pattern here?).


I've updated my sidebar list with the books I'll be reading in June. What are you reading this summer?