It was a poor week last week, just 4 books bought and only 4 books from the library! This week is shaping up to be much better already :D The bottom two are obviously for my "Stuff Not Fluff" challenge! Library books were - The Ghost's Child - Sonya Hartnett Fall On Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald The Other Hand - Chris Cleave The Owl Killers - Karen Maitland Continue reading

Eyes Like Stars - Lisa Mantchev 5/5 Blurb from FF - All her world's a stage. Bertie Shakespeare Smith is not an actress, yet she lives in a theatre. She's not an orphan, but she has no parents. She knows every part, but she has no lines of her own. That is, until now. Enter Stage Right NATE. Dashing pirate. Will do anything to protect Bertie. COBWEB, MOTH, MUSTARD SEED, and PEASEBLOSSOM. Four tiny and incredibly annoying fairies. BERTIE'S sidekicks. Ariel. Seductive air spirit and Bertie's weakness. The symbol of impending doom. Bertie. Our heroine. Welcome to the Theatre Illuminata,... Continue reading

Having been rumbled in my currently fluffy reading habits some of my fellow readers over at BCF have taken it upon themselves to find me some more challenging reads. They've started off great, the first 3 books in my Stuff Not Fluff Challenge are - Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs Fingersmith - Sarah Waters Reading Lolita In Tehran - Azar Nafisi Look for more titles coming soon! Continue reading

Comfort Food - Kate Jacobs 2/5 Blurb from Fantastic Fiction "Shortly before turning the big 5-0, boisterous party planner and Cooking with Gusto! personality Augusta 'Gus' Simpson finds herself planning a birthday party she'd rather not - her own. She's getting tired of being the hostess, the mother hen, the woman who has to plan her own birthday party. What she needs is time on her own with enough distance to give her loved ones the ingredients to put together successful lives without her. Assisted by a handsome up-and-coming chef, Oliver, Gus invites a select group to take an on-air... Continue reading

I was lucky enough to get a few gift certificates from Amazon for my birthday and i've spent the last 6 hours trying to decide what to get! In the end I went with the following titles - Meridian - Amber Kizer Midnight Never Come - Marie Brennan In Ashes Lie - Marie Brennan The Rapture - Liz Jansen Eyes Like Stars - Lisa Mantchev Nightfall - Stephen Leather The Ladies Of Grace Adieu & Other Stories - Susanna Clarke They've all been on my wish-list for a while and I went with pot luck, picking one title from the... Continue reading

It's a sickness I tell you! I am definitely addicted to books and I'm rapidly running out of room for any more I got a nice big box this morning containing - The Castle Omnibus by Steph Swainston Powers by Ursula le Guin Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick Fallen by Lauren Kate Ruined by Paula Morris Fantasy In Death by J D Robb Shades Of Grey by Jasper Fforde Happy, happy happy!!! And very grateful for Christmas gift certificates Continue reading

The Magicians - Lev Grossman 4/5 Blurb from Fantastic Fiction - Quentin Coldwater's life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead - but a strange envelope bearing Quentin's name leads him down a very different path to any he'd ever imagined. The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it's a world that seems to answer all Quentin's desires. But the idyll cannot last -... Continue reading

Nightlife - Rob Thurman 4/5 Blurb from Fantastic Fiction In New York, there's a troll under the Brooklyn Bridge, a boggle in Central Park, and a beautiful vampire in a penthouse on the Upper East Side. Of course, most humans are oblivious to this, but Cal Leandros is only half-human. His father's dark lineage is the stuff of nightmares - and he and his entire otherworldly race are after Cal. He and his half-brother Niko have managed to stay a step ahead for three years, but now Cal's dad has found them again. And Cal is about to learn why... Continue reading

The Castle Omnibus - Steph Swainston Moonshine - Rob Thurman Madhouse - Rob Thurman Deathwish - Rob Thurman Trick Of The Light - Rob Thurman Continue reading

Macbeth by William Shakespeare Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Manticore by Robertson Davies Marathon Man by William Goldman The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer Mencken's Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides The Miracle Worker by William Gibson Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music... Continue reading

Bold = Read Pink = Read but will read again Blue = On Mount TBR Anything else = Not read 1984 by George Orwell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt Anna Karenina - Tolstoy Anne Frank's Diary - Anne Frank Archidamian War by Donald Kagan The Art of Fiction by Henry James The Art of War by Sun Tzu As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Atonement by Ian McEwan Autobiography... Continue reading

The Confessions Of Max Tivoli - Andrew Sean Greer 4/5 Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders - Gyles Brandreth 4/5 Light Of The Moon - Luanne Rice 2/5 Blood Engines - T A Pratt 4/5 Poison Sleep - T A Pratt 3/5 Unshapely Things - Mark del Franco 3/5 Nightlife - Rob Thurman 4/5 Continue reading

Right, my reading took a nosedive at the end of last year for various reasons so I'm going to use this to give me the proverbial kick These are some of the books I have lined up for January - have read a few already which I'll stick in a separate post. Bear in mind my reading is so eccentric in taste it might make your head spin, I make no excuses for the alarming discovery that half my reading seems to be of the "trashy" genre recently To Read In January Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin (re-read) Immortal -... Continue reading