I'm going to try a new thing here. We'll give it a try and see how everyone likes it. It's called "What Are You Reading". An online book group I belong to does this and it's usually interesting to see what other people are reading, as well as whether they recommend it or not. There'll be a new thread started every month although obviously you can always go back and look through the previous ones if you're looking for a good book recommendation. It's a great way to find new books, and some of my favorite books I read last year I saw discussed in the "What Are You Reading" thread there.

What we'll do is post what you're reading, then give a brief summary (it can only be 1 or 2 sentences) and you can say what you think about the book and whether you'd recommend it or not.

I'll post the first one below so you can get the idea, although yours doesn't have to be as long as this....we all know I'm windy!! So come and add what you're reading!!!

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ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN by JACQUELYN MITCHARD

Amazon.com: All We Know of Heaven: A Novel: Jacquelyn Mitchard: Books

I just finished reading this book and have mixed feeling about it. I was excited to read it because I had heard it was loosely based on the story of the 2 girls in an accident where their identities were confused and the one they thought was dead (and the parents buried her) was actually alive, and the one that was thought to be alive (with parents doing a 24 hour vigil) was actually dead. That happened here in Indiana and there was a lot of press about it. Plus I had read Mitchard's "Deep End of the Ocean" and really enjoyed it and many people on the other site were talking about how much they loved this book.

The book has no similarity in truth to that true story except for the mistaken identity twist. In the book (unlike real life) the girls were two best friends since childhood and their families were good friends. It deals with how the families react when they learn about the mistake, how the boyfriend of the dead girl is conflicted when he finds out it's the friend and not his girlfriend alive, and about the living girl's recovery.

There were parts of it that were very interesting, but it seemed to drag on a bit to me. I used to work in neurosurgical nursing and had dealt with a lot of head injury patients (which is what the surviving girl was). Maybe other people who didn't know as much about the rehabilitation process would find those parts more interesting.

All in all I would say it was an interesting read, but it certainly won't make my top books list.

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I am reading In Defence of Food, by Michael Pollan Barnes*&*Noble.com - Books: In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan, Hardcover
I'm only about half way through but I am enjoying it. Though I kind of grow tired of this man's writing style, he does make an interesting arguement for eating whole foods and does show that despite all of our advancements that there really is a lot still to be learned.

I just finished The Memory of Water by Karen White.

The Memory of Water - Google Book Search


This is a story about two sisters and mental illness. Their mother drowned after taking them out on a sail boat in a storm. They both remember things differently and resent each other for different things throughout their lives. Marnie leaves right after high school and doesn't come back for 10 years, when it turns out Diana has the same mental illness their mother had and has had an accident on a sail boat with her son. It was so much fun trying to figure out what the reality was and what each sister only perceived as reality. LOVE LOVE LOVED it!

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Wendy~Self-proclaimed hippie momma to Bob and Jamie

Gonna have to add this to my list!!! See, this is why this thread is good. I'd never heard of this book, but it sounds very interesting to me.

Thanks to both of you for posting your reviews!!

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I just got through reading The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver.

The main character is this book, Kathryn Dance, is an expert in Kinesics, which is the study of body movements and how to tell if a person is lying or telling the truth. She's called in to interview a criminal who's in prison for killing almost an entire family (During his murderous rampage, he overlooked one little girl who was sleeping in bed. She was dubbed by the press as "The Sleeping Doll".). While serving time for these murders, he's implicated in an older murder. The murderer is brought to a separate facility to be interviewed by Kathryn. Something goes wrong and the murderer escapes. The rest of the book deals with finding the murderer and how Kathryn uses Kinesics to work with the various people involved. The writing is tight, the characters are well-developed, and the book is full of twists and turns (lots of "I didn't see that coming" moments). It's a recent book (2007) and one of the best books I've read in a while. I give it two thumbs up.

Jeffery Deaver is the writer of the Lincoln Rhyme series (Remember the movie 'The Bone Collector'? That's Lincoln Rhyme.) I'm thinking Kathryn Dance may have been a spinoff from a Lincoln Rhyme book because he's periodically mentioned (and briefly appears) in this book. This is the 2nd book I've read by this author and he's slowly becoming one of my favorites.

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When the sun came up this morning I took the time to watch it rise,
as its beauty struck the darkness from the skies.
I thought how small and unimportant all my troubles seem to be,
and how lucky another day belongs to me. ~ Jerry Reed

At the moment I am having a light read. The book is called You Can Get Arrested For That: 2 Guys, 25 Dumb Laws, 1 Absurd American Crime Spee, by Rich Smith.
It caught my eye at the library, and I thought my teen son would be amused. I hadn't planned on reading the whole book, just finding the silly laws, but you do have to read the whole book to find them out, so I am reading it.
A guy in England finds out about some silly American laws(like peeling an orange in a hotel room in California) and decides to bring a friend along to America to break all these rules. The author is pretty funny, but I was turned off by the fact that he really tried to break a law about oral sex with girls he just met at a bar. I will still finish the book though. I want to find out what laws they ended up breaking.
Hmmm...not sure this book is a good one for my son to read. LOL.

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"It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching."

-- St. Francis of Assisi

That sounds hilarious! It makes you wonder how these silly laws got on the books in the first place.

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When the sun came up this morning I took the time to watch it rise,
as its beauty struck the darkness from the skies.
I thought how small and unimportant all my troubles seem to be,
and how lucky another day belongs to me. ~ Jerry Reed

Thanks starlite and penelope for adding some reviews!! We're getting off to a good start.

I don't normally read a lot of mystery but that sounds pretty good. My sil is a HUGE mystery fan so I'll have to ask her if she's familiar with that author.

And Penelope....no you may not want your son to read that book!!!

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Just finished Kite Runner (LOVED IT!) but right now I'm reading
Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson)
Love it also! Only about 50 pages left.

He is a mountain climber who gets help from the people living in this area (Pakistan) when he's in trouble and promises to come back and build a school for them one day...he has now built about 55 schools over there. The book goes through all of the issues, problems, victories he went thru as he started the CAI (Central Asia Institute)

I love reading books about this area of the world.

Savin'mommy