Mailbox Monday is on tour, with January’s location being at At Home with Books.

I actually hadn’t received a book in the mail at all this year until the 21st! I think that’s got to be some kind of a record for me, haha!

A Paperbackswap wishlist book:

 Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson by Lyndsay Faye

From the gritty streets of nineteenth century London, the loyal and courageous Dr. Watson offers a tale unearthed after generations of lore: the harrowing story of Sherlock Holmes’s attempt to hunt down Jack the Ripper.
As England’s greatest specialist in criminal detection, Sherlock Holmes is unwavering in his quest to capture the killer responsible for terrifying London’s East End. He hires an “unfortunate” known as Mary Ann Monk, the friend of a fellow streetwalker who was one of the Ripper’s earliest victims; and he relies heavily on the steadfast and devoted Dr. John H. Watson. When Holmes himself is wounded in Whitechapel during an attempt to catch the savage monster, the popular press launches an investigation of its own, questioning the great detective’s role in the very crimes he is so fervently struggling to prevent. Stripped of his credibility, Holmes is left with no choice but to break every rule in the desperate race to find the madman known as “the Knife” before it is too late.

I also received 5 books from my grandmother:

2009 was a wonderful year for us. We had just bought our house in late December 2008 and were gearing up to put down hardwood floors and get everything painted and ready to move in. And then the ice storm hit around January 25th or 26th. And it was terrible. Personally, we were without power at our duplex for 5 days and without it at the house for 7. We were lucky enough to be able to go up and stay with my family so that we would have heat, but Nathan had to continue to work. So he had to make the drive back and forth until power was restored at our duplex.

I remember driving around through town and the place looked like a war zone. Everything was deserted, power lines were everywhere, trees/limbs were down. It was an absolute mess. It was unbelievable. I had never seen anything like it.

Flash forward to March of 2009. We had been moved into our house for a few weeks and the urge was starting to hit us. We *had* to have a puppy! So we went on the search. I’m not entirely sure why we chose to get a Westie, but it was a breed we both settled on. Then we lucked out and found a breeder only an hour away from us. So we called her up and talked to her and made plans to go down and see what she had one Saturday afternoon.

We get down there and fall in love with this sweet little ball of fur. He was very calm and sweet. He loved cuddling with us. We made our decision with very little thought. And while he was technically ready to go home that day, we felt more comfortable leaving him for one more week since we really weren’t all that prepared at home.

The next week the breeder was coming up and actually going right through our hometown to meet another woman buying a different puppy about another hour from us. So she said she would be more than happy to bring our little one along for the ride and we would meet at the rest stop right of the interstate, about a 7 mile drive from our house. It was perfect. I packed up the crate and a few toys and off I went to bring the little dude home.

Needless to say we fell in love immediately that night! And we’ve been so blessed to have him in our lives since then. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t manage to make us smile and laugh. I can’t believe that three years have passed; it doesn’t really seem possible to have been that long since we brought him home.

Happy birthday, Buster!

I was covered up at work all of Monday and Tuesday, which left no time for reading at all. Wednesday night we had a Saluki basketball game to go to, so no reading when I got home from that. And then Friday we went and saw Brantley Gilbert & Eric Church in concert – which was really awesome! And Baby G likes music

So I really didn’t get much reading done then, and yesterday my parents came down and we went out to eat for lunch and then to the mall to get me some maternity tops. I’ve been in maternity jeans for a month now, but I have still been able to wear my old tops. I can still wear most of them, but I wanted to go ahead and buy some new stuff. When I got home from the mall yesterday I proceeded to take a 3 hour nap because I actually didn’t sleep in from the night before (we got home at 12:30am and I was up by 7:15 – ugh!).

Last night my Salukis got creamed, we are talking the absolute worst outing in their 98 year history. I am so ashamed to be a Saluki fan today. We need to FIRE OUR COACH! But the stupid school signed him to a lucrative $750,000/year contract a few years back that now has 2 years remaining after this season, that they can’t afford to buy him out of. Ugh. Too bad the school has yet to realize that they are losing a ton of their season ticket holders and donors over this debacle … it would be more cost-effective for them to find a way to fire him rather than continue to lose attendance. But I’m not the one running the show.

Today I slept in … finally! And I’ve been working on getting a post scheduled for Mailbox Monday (I got a really cool looking book in the mail yesterday that I’m super excited about getting to!) and now this post. So I obviously haven’t read anything this morning either. And with the football games on this afternoon, even though I *hate* football, my husband will insist we watch them and I will have to either leave the room or hope he will agree to have the volume way down so that I can get some reading done. Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll just end up playing Yahoo games the entire time he watches the games, lol.

So I guess the argument could be made that I just haven’t been in the mood to read, because in all honesty, I have had opportunities to read this past week, I just haven’t done anything with them.

But I think I’m going to change that … I think I’m going to get off of here and go read I hope everyone has a good day today!

Copyright: 1996
Pages: 341
Rating: 4/5
Read: Jan. 8 – Jan. 15, 2012
Challenge: The Eclectic Reader 2012; Mystery & Suspense 2012; Off the Shelf 2012
Yearly Count: 2
Format: Print
Source: Personal Copy

Blurb: A young woman is shot in cold blood, her lifeless body dumped outside the stadium at the height of the US Open. Once her tennis career had skyrocketed. Now the headlines are being made by another young player form the wrong side of the tracks.

When Myron Bolitar investigates the killing he uncovers a connection between the two players and a six-year-old murder at an exclusive club. Suddenly Myron is in over his head. And with a dirty senator, a jealous mother, and the mob all drawn into the case, he finds himself playing the most dangerous game of all…

Review: So this is the second in the Myron Bolitar series. I read the first one (Deal Breaker) a long time ago. (And please excuse my terrible review, which was before I got very detailed in my reviews). I wasn’t too impressed, so naturally I wasn’t in very much of a hurry to get around to the second book. For whatever reason, I decided to give this series another shot. I’m glad I did. To be completely honest, having that big of a gap (3 years) in between reading the two books, I was a little lost. I didn’t remember the supporting characters. I didn’t remember some things that were mentioned. But that was okay for me; it didn’t hurt my opinion of the book at all.

What I continually kept asking myself while reading this book was this: was the first book this funny? I mean, I’m talking laugh out loud funny at times. Other times it was cheesy funny. But in all seriousness, I don’t recall Myron being humorous. I would assume that he was funny in the first book, that’s not something that is likely to change in a character; I just don’t remember that aspect of Myron’s character. Either way, I enjoyed the humor.

The big ah-ha moment came at a perfect time in my opinion. I hadn’t figured out what was really going on before the big reveal. That’s exactly how I like my books to be, I don’t want to figure it all out way too early and then have to finish the rest of the book. And to be completely honest, the person who ended up being the killer made perfect sense when I sat down and really thought about some of the clues left throughout the book.

Overall, I would recommend this book. I found it to be funny and enjoyable. And while I would recommend reading any series in order, this book stands relatively well on its own.

We received a little bit of tough news during my scan. Not life-threatening, world-crushing, or heartbreaking news. Just tough. And when I say tough, it basically means that it could be nothing or it could be something. Right now there are no additional tests to be done. And the chances of it being something are slim to none.

However, to me, it’s something. I’m the one carrying little G (He has a name, but we’re not sharing that until birth, so he will be G until June). I’m the one growing him. And for me to be told that there could be something wrong … it’s hurting me. Terribly.

So, now that I’ve been pretty cryptic, I’ll give you the whole scoop.

First I go in for my regularly scheduled doctor appointment. I’m up 1 pound, my blood pressure was a little elevated (shouldn’t have had those chips with lunch right before my appointment!), we found his heartbeat on the doppler and it was normal, and all my screenings came back negative. I left there feeling pretty good. Then it was downstairs to go to the anatomy scan.

I had read a little bit about anatomy scans, so I knew pretty well what they were going to be looking for. But I was still a little bit nervous because this was where we could see if there were any major problems. Unfortunately, I was alone at this point because my mother had a previously scheduled appointment of her own in the same building and since we were running late she couldn’t go to the scan with me. But I was fine with that. I would have liked for her to have been able to experience the ultrasound with me, but whatever.

The technician was very nice and thorough. She took a lot of images and we got 5 or 6 keepsake pictures. She confirmed that G. is still a boy – we had found out with an elective U/S at 15 weeks, and I wanted to double check because I actually do know people who have been surprised in the delivery room … when they didn’t really want to be! She went through everything, but I noticed she was focusing on the heart quite a lot. I didn’t think much about it at the time, I just assumed that since the heart is such an important organ that it’s commonplace to look so in-depth at it. But she quit saying as much to me. I still didn’t think much about it, mainly because he was moving around a lot and giving her heck about staying still to get the images. It wasn’t until she was completely done and started printing our images that she asked if I had been scheduled for a consultation as well. I told her I didn’t know, this appointment was made for me through my OBGYN and all I knew was when and where to show up.

This was the red flag. I thought to myself, something isn’t right. If the technician suspects there’s a problem, then it must be a big one. The images haven’t even crossed a doctor’s desk yet. She leaves the room and I’m all alone and panicking. You can imagine how I felt at this point. Apparently, the doctor who reads these images was working out of a different office that day. But I had signed a teleconference release form while in the waiting room. So I got to teleconference with the doctor in a little room with just a chair, desk, TV … and tissues. More panicking ensues.

I’m sitting there waiting for the doctor to come into the room on her end. She finally does and she sits down and says that everything looks normal, but that he has an Echogenic Intracardiac Focus (EIF). My heart broke. It’s basically a white spot, a calcium deposit, on his heart. She starts talking about pediatric cardiologists. Then she asks me if I had done any of the prenatal screening. I told her yes and that I had just found out that everything came back negative. But then I remembered the nurse telling me before they took the blood work for the screening, that there are false negatives. So, more panicking.

At this point my head is spinning, my world is crashing down around me, and I don’t know what to do. She indicated that this could be nothing, that sometimes they just pop up on ultrasounds, and then in a routine 3rd trimester ultrasound, it might be completely gone. Or it could be something that we would have to deal with after he’s born. I asked if there was any additional tests that I would need to have done, she said no. Okay. So by this point my parents have re-joined me in this little conference room and they only hear the tail end of all this. At this point I can’t even remember what the name of the problem even is. That’s how much my head was spinning.

Then they send me on my merry little way. I drove separate from my parents to the hospital, and we were going to go and do other things after my appointment, but first we were going to take my car home and that way we would only have one car when we met up with my husband for dinner later that night. So I called Nathan in my car on the way home. I’m crying and trying to get all this out to let him know what’s going on and I can’t even tell him what the name of the problem. All while trying to drive home. I’m sure I looked like a crazy woman! He calms me down and reassures me that we will deal with what we have to deal with as it comes to me.

But by this point I’m stuck on the word Intracardiac. I have a friend who has a 3 year old little boy who was born with a heart problem and actually had open heart surgery 3 days after his birth. That was just the first of many heart surgeries that he has had to go through. Now they have been told that he needs many more surgeries, but that it’s only going to get worse from here. They can choose to do the surgeries, or they could let him live out the rest of his life without the surgeries. Either way, she will be burying her baby.

By this point I’m in an absolute panic, worrying that we will have to be going through the same thing.

I put it out of my mind for a while and tried to put on a brave face for my parents. I didn’t really want to have to deal with it. I just didn’t. Nathan naturally had to Google it and he came to dinner saying, oh it’s common for these things to show up on ultrasounds, but they normally don’t amount to anything after birth. And from what I’ve read, this can be found in 3-5% of all pregnancies.

I made it all of 24 hours before I had to Google it for myself. Turns out, it has absolutely NOTHING to do with his heart.

I never thought my world could crash any further. But it did.

It can be a marker for Down Syndrome.

Now I understood why the doctor asked me if I had had the prenatal screenings. I understood why she kept saying that pediatric cardiologists usually aren’t very concerned about these. I’m way under 35, I’m not at risk for Down Syndrome. Yet, there it is. In black and white.

Obviously, we will love G. whether he’s a happy normal healthy baby or a Down Syndrome baby. That’s not going to change for us. But it’s very disheartening to know that this is a possibility. And while it is a slim possibility (based on my age and the fact that the screenings were negative) it’s still there. I still have to deal with it. It’s definitely made me view things completely different.

It has given me a newfound respect for parents of special needs children. Knowing that I could be in their boat, it makes me realize that while I never considered having anything but a normal healthy baby, I can deal with anything. If G. does indeed end up being a Down Syndrome baby, bring it on. I’m ready. If he’s not, I’ll be extremely grateful.

It’s just amazing the amount of love that I feel for someone I’ve yet to meet. And no matter what happens, I can’t wait to be G.’s mommy.

Copyright: 2007
Pages: 540
Rating: 4/5
Read: Jan. 1 – Jan. 7, 2012
Challenge: The Eclectic Reader 2012; Mystery & Suspense 2012; Off the Shelf 2012
Yearly Count: 1
Format: Print
Source: Personal Copy

Blurb: After narrowly escaping incineration in a devastating fire that consumes a Danish museum, Cotton Malone – former Justice Department agent turned rare-book dealer – learns from his friend, the beguiling adventurer Cassiopeia Vitt, that the blaze was neither an accident nor an isolated incident. As part of a campaign of arson intended to mask a far more diabolical design, buildings across Europe are being devoured by infernos of unnatural strength. Born from the ashes is a new Eastern European nation whose ruthless leader will soon draw Cotton into an intense geopolitical chess game against a shadowy cabal of power brokers. The prize lies buried with the mummified remains of Alexander the Great – in a tomb lost to the ages for more than two thousand years. Trekking from Denmark to Venice to Central Asia, Cotton and Cassiopeia are determined to solve an ancient puzzle whose solution could destroy or save millions of people – depending on who finds the lost tomb first.

Review: This is the third in the Cotton Malone series. I find this to be such a fun series! There’s always just enough history combined with incredible action, it just makes a great combination.

I felt in this book we really got a lot more insight into who Cassiopeia Vitt is. In the two previous books, she’s kind of been an enigma in my opinion. So it was really nice to learn more about Cassiopeia in a way that the readers hadn’t before.

As I stated above, I think what really draws me to these books is how there is some historical aspect to them. The first book dealt with Templars, the second involved the lost Library of Alexandria, and this book focused on Alexander the Great and where he was really buried. Having majored in history, these books really interest me. And there’s always non-stop action. I really do find it to be a perfect blend.

I have the next book in this series already on my shelf, I hope I get to it sooner rather than later. I would highly recommend this book and the series as a whole.

In 2011, I completed 64 books. Overall, I am very pleased with that number. I had a whirlwind year complete with a trip to Alaska in May and a positive pregnancy test in September. As you will soon see, my reading dipped unbelievably after September … mid-October is when the nausea set in for me and reading was the last thing on my mind – then the holidays hit. Well, you all know how life works

I made a chart showing how my reading broke down month by month. As I stated above, I was doing really well until October  The green lines indicate the number of pages read, and if you look way at the bottom, just above the months, you can see the number of books read.

Of the 64 books I read, 61 were fiction and 3 were non-fiction. Not really all that pleased with that breakdown. I  need to read more non-fiction. I enjoy non-fiction, I love true crime and good history books. I just don’t read a lot of them any more because I’m usually looking for an escape. Maybe I can read a little more non-fiction in 2012. A girl can hope, right?

When I sat down and tried to look back over my reading list as a whole, I realized that I didn’t really read a lot of books that would make my top 10 list. I was a little disappointed by that.
So this year, I only have a Top 7 Favorite Reads list.

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2. We’re Not Leaving: 9/11 Responders Tell Their Stories of Courage, Sacrifice, and Renewal by Benjamin J. Luft, M.D.
3. The Confession by John Grisham
4. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
5. The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
6. Still Missing by Chevy Stevens
7. Envy by Gregg Olsen

I started a new page on my blog for 2011. I was determined to track how many books came into my house throughout the year. Boy was I insane to do that. I am actually a little embarrassed at the number that did come in (197), especially when you compare that number to the number of books I actually managed to read for the year! Anyway, here’s a chart showing the breakdown of the books that came into my house in 2011:

Obviously, I went a little nuts in March and July. In March I posted a ton of books onto Paperbackswap and got a lot of Box-of-Books swap requests as a result. And I obviously have a control issue when it comes to pushing that “decline” button. In July I went to the library book sale and I had a big box swap come in from a friend on one of my Yahoo groups.

My next logical question was where on earth did these books come from? For this question, I created a pie chart:
Obviously most of my books came from Paperbackswap’s Box-of-Books feature. This really doesn’t surprise me at all. I know I’m addicted to that, but for $8 a year and postage I can swap unlimited without points. Can’t hardly beat that in my opinion. Plus the more you swap at a time the more you save on postage. It’s kind of a win-win situation for me! I honestly didn’t spend a whole lot on buying new books, I try to avoid bookstores as much as possible simply because I have no self-control. The amount of review books that I accepted in 2011 was way down. I became extremely selective. And I will be even more so in 2012 considering I’m probably not going to accept any review books – unless they are authors I have previously read and enjoyed.

Finally I’m going to finish with a quick by the numbers breakdown of how I rated my books, the page count breakdown and the publication year breakdown.

So there it is. That’s about all I have to share with everyone. I could have made a few more entries, but I think this adequately sums up my 2011 reading.

Now I’m off to read …. I only have about 150 more pages before I finish my first book of 2012!! Happy reading everyone!

While the above picture is not the exact view I will be having for the coming week, it is very close

I’m off to Florida for the next week. It’s a much-needed vacation/babymoon!

When I get back I will get everything together for my end of the year stats/favorite reads. I know everyone is starting to do this now. I’m a slacker and won’t get mine done for a while

See everyone next year!

Merry Christmas! I hope everyone has a wonderful day filled with family and friends!

Copyright: 2011
Pages: 364
Rating: 5/5
Read: Dec. 19 – Dec. 24, 2011
Challenge: No challenge
Yearly Count: 64
Format: Print
Source: Library Copy

Blurb: Detective Alex Cross is one of the first on the scene of the biggest casee he’s ever been part of. The president’s son and daughter have been abducted from their school – an impossible crime, but somehow the kidnapper has done it. Alex does everything he can but is shunted to the fringes of the investigation. Someone powerful doesn’t want him too close.

A deadly contagion in the DC water supply endangers the capital, and Alex sees the looming threat of the most devastating attack the United States has ever experienced. He is already working flat out on the abduction, and this massive assault pushes him completely over the edge.

With each hour that passes, the chances of finding the children alive diminish. In an emotional private meeting, the First Lady asks Alex to please save her kids. Even the highest security clearance doesn’t get him any closer to the kidnapper – and Alex makes a desperate decision that goes against everything he believes. A full-throttle thriller with unstoppable action, unrestrained emotion, and relentless suspense, Kill Alex Cross is the most gripping Alex Cross novel James Patters has ever written.

Review: Oh how I do love a good Alex Cross book! This is one of the very few book series that I am actually caught up on. And considering I haven’t really been reading (this is the first book I’ve finished in December), I *knew* Mr. Patterson’s Alex Cross would not disappoint me!

As usual this book sucked me in from the first page. It brought flashes back to me of the very first Alex Cross book, Along Came a Spider, where Alex is involved in a high-profile kidnapping. The terrorist portion of the storyline was very interesting as well, especially considering *SPOILER*: one of the terrorists gets away *END SPOILER*

Let’s just face it, I’m a huge fan of the Alex Cross series. I have nothing bad to say about this book. All I can do is recommend this series and this book to every single one of my readers.