Theme Thursdays -- Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

Theme Thursdays is a brand-new meme hosted by Kavyen over at Reading Between Pages.  She says:


Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one Thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:

• A theme will be posted each week (on Thursdays)
• Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
• Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
• It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)
  Ex: If the theme is KISS; your sentence can have “They kissed so gently” or “Their lips touched each other” or “The smooch was so passionate”

This week’s theme is – LOVE

 (Warning--slight spoilers.)

So she went off to India and on the way she met Richard Erskine and fell in love with him.  There again, she behaved not like a sex-crazy girl, but like a decent and honourable girl. She didn't urge him to leave his wife.  She urged him not to do so.  But when she saw Walter Fane, she knew that she couldn't marry him, and because she didn't know what else to do, she wired her brother for money to go home.

p.286, Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

This is the first Miss Marple I've re-read in a while and it wasn't as enjoyable as I was expecting. I used to really like the Marple books, so I'm interested to see if it is just the specific storyline of Sleeping Murder or if I'm just off Marple entirely for now.

Fiona is here with me tonight

and I'm glad.  She was at school yesterday, with her dad last night, and at school again today.  For some reason I especially missed her, much more than usual.  It's nice to be together tonight.  We walked to the park when she got home and now we've eaten and brushed teeth and are curling up in bed with music and books.   We may finish our Albert Einstein biography tonight, we'll see.  She'll be off to school in the morning and then with her dad til Sunday. My hope is to work on divorce paperwork and tasks (like e-mailing the mediator with a list of what I'd like to cover in our next session) as well as job stuff and the cross-stitch I'm working on for Fiona. 

Blessings to you all this night.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris was my book club book this month.  I'm actually the one who brought it as an option after several friends kept wanting me to try it.  Sorry folks, I just didn't love it.   Didn't really like it, to tell the truth.

It's the first in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, upon which HBO's True Blood series is based.  Sookie is a cocktail waitress from Bon Temps, Louisiana.  Vampires have recently come out of their coffins (get it?) and Sookie's been eagerly waiting to meet one.  Her wish comes true when Bill wanders into her bar -- and the bonus is that, unlike most people she encounters, she can't hear his thoughts.  Zany hijinks ensue.  (Translation:  I can't be bothered to recount more of the storyline.)

The best part for me was Sookie's ability to read minds -- perhaps because I didn't know that was a part of the storyline.  I was able to predict a certain character's alter ego -- also my favorite character -- or  at least my favorite after Harris killed off the member of Sookie's family I'd been enjoying getting to know. 

I'm not sure why I was so turned off -- I know that Sookie and Bill's relationship is everything I tend to hate about most paranormal-regular Jill relationships in this genre.  (Bottom line is, I don't find being in a relationship with someone you're afraid of (even part of the time) to be an awesome thing.)  Beyond that issue, though, I just didn't care about the book -- I didn't hate it, but it's just not my kind of fluff.

It's somewhat rare for me to start a series and not want to finish it or at least read a few more before I decide for sure.  This is going to be one of those times -- Sorry Sookie.

Teaser Tuesdays --- Cat Running by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

On Saturday morning Mama had one of her sick headaches.  As soon as the others left for the store, she went back to bed.

~ page 109, Cat Running by Zilpha Keatley Snyder 

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you.

Yep

No matter how long or short her stay here in the river community, she would need a few essentials to make her life agreeable and eventually she would have to come up with a more permanent plan.  

But not today.  Today she merely had to figure out how to survive until tomorrow.

p. 41, Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn