6. Shelter Me

This was a B&N read... took me several trips to finish it and really, I should have bought it cause it's a bit of a tear jerker and I hate it when I cry in the bookstore. :)

I definitely liked this one a lot and would recommend it. Here's the description from B&N:

Four months after her husband's death, Janie LaMarche remains undone by grief and anger. Her mourning is disrupted, however, by the unexpected arrival of a builder with a contract to add a porch onto her house. Stunned, Janie realizes the porch was meant to be a surprise from her husband—now his last gift to her.

As she reluctantly allows construction to begin, Janie clings to the familiar outposts of her sorrow—mothering her two small children with fierce protectiveness, avoiding friends and family, and stewing in a rage she can't release. Yet Janie's self-imposed isolation is breached by a cast of unlikely interventionists: her chattering, ipecac-toting aunt; her bossy, over-manicured neighbor; her muffin-bearing cousin; and even Tug, the contractor with a private grief all his own.

As the porch takes shape, Janie discovers that the unknowable terrain of the future is best navigated with the help of others—even those we least expect to call on, much less learn to love.

5. Transfer of Power

A week of DC living and I had to start rereading the Vince Flynn books. Just like the first time, I really enjoyed Transfer of Power and will likely reread some others too.

Here's a review from B&N.com:

In this long political thriller staged almost entirely around a hostage standoff, Flynn makes maximum use of his White House setting, and mixes in a spicy broth of brutal terrorists, heroic commandos and enough secret agent hijinks to keep the confrontation bubbling until its flag-raising end. The villains are led by Rafique Aziz, a notorious Arab terrorist whose band of thugs takes over the White House by finding a weak point in American politics: they pose as wealthy campaign contributors and are welcomed through the front door. President Robert Hayes manages to escape to his bunker moments before the bloodbath, but religious zealot Aziz takes almost 100 hostages, seals off the White House and begins making demands, of which large sums of cash are just the beginning. With the president incommunicado and weak-willed yet power hungry Vice President Sherman Baxter in charge, the Pentagon and the CIA resort to their secret weapon: commando extraordinaire Mitch Rapp. After sneaking into the bowels of the Executive Mansion through an air duct, Rapp steadily disrupts the terrorists' well-laid plans. He finally calls in reinforcements when Aziz begins drilling into the president's bunker. It's a long haul to the finish, but Flynn (Term Limits) compensates for some stereotyping by creating dynamic tension between the main players, especially between military leaders and politicians, and between Rapp and Aziz. His description of the White House is impressive; readers will wonder if the secret passageways, hidden rooms and clever deception devices that help load this story with seemingly endless intrigue, really exist.

4. Time of My Life

This one was good... different, but good. The main character wakes up one day 7 years in her past and has the chance to relive her life making different choices this time around. The parts I liked the most were when it talked about making choices for yourself versus making the choices you think others want you to make. Interesting stuff...

Anyway, here's the description from B&N:

Jillian Westfield has the perfect suburban life straight out of the upscale women's magazines that she obsessively reads. She’s got the modern-print rugs of Metropolitan Home, the elegant meals from Gourmet, the clutter-free closets out of Real Simple, and the elaborate Easter egg hunts seen in Parents. With her successful investment banker husband behind the wheel and her cherubic eighteen-month-old in the backseat, hers could be the family in the magazines’ glossy Range Rover ads.

Yet somehow all of the how-to magazine stories in the world can’t seem to fix her faltering marriage, banish the tedium of days spent changing diapers, or stop her from asking, “What if?”

Then one morning Jillian wakes up seven years in the past. Before her daughter was born. Before she married Henry. Suddenly she’s back in her post–grad school Ikea-furnished Manhattan apartment. She’s back in her fast-paced job with the advertising agency. And she’s still with Jackson, the ex-boyfriend and star of her what-if fantasies.

Armed with twenty-twenty hindsight, she’s free to choose all over again. She can use the zippy ad campaigns from her future to wow the clients and bosses in her present. She can reconnect with the mother who abandoned her so many years before. She can fix the fights at every juncture that doomed her relationship with Jackson. Or can she?

With each new choice setting off a trajectory of unforeseen consequences, Jillian soon realizes that getting to happily ever after is more complicated than changing the lines in her part of the script. Happiness, it turns out,isn’t an either-or proposition. As she closes in on all the things she thought she wanted, Jillian must confront the greatest what-if of all: What if the problem was never Henry or Jackson, but her?

Sharp, funny, and heartwarming, Time of My Life will appeal to anyone who has ever wanted to redo the past and will leave readers pondering, “Do we get the reality we deserve?”

3. Such a Pretty Fat

Jen Lancaster is hysterical. Yet another not-to-be-read-in-public-unless-you-want-people-staring-when-you-continue-to-laugh-out-loud book.

Rather then the usual summary here's a short excerpt:

Personal Training, Session One: I'm standing at the front desk, waiting for the mythical "Barbie" to appear. While I was sucking down water and aspirin earlier today, trying to shed my hangover, I started thinking about how judgmental I can be. I mean, why should I have instantly freaked out when I heard someone named Barbie was going to be my trainer? Sure, the name brings up images of gorgeous girls with long blonde hair, shiny white teeth, deep tans, and impossible-to-achieve, completely enviable figures, but maybe this Barbie is different.

Maybe Trainer Barbie is a dark, homely girl with an overbite and she took up fitness to feel better about her hump and her skin condition. Yes, that's it. Barbie is all hideous and disfigured and she will have a heart of gold and because of this, she'll be devoted to nothing but making me lose weight...

I stand by the magazine rack and I'm about to pull out this week's In Touch when I hear my name being called. I turn around and look for my gargoyle of a trainer.

But I don't see any monsters.

All I see is a gorgeous girl with long blonde hair, shiny white teeth, a deep tan, and an impossible-to- achieve, completely enviable figure standing there. "Hey, are you Jen?" she asks.

"I'm Barbie!"

Of course you are.

************************************************

And, good news - Lancaster's 4th book comes out this spring! I can't wait.

2. Bright Lights, Big Ass

This book is laugh out loud funny. Seriously, I don't suggest reading it in a public place, like Starbucks for example, unless you want lots of people giving you weird looks as you burst out laughing every few pages. Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything...



Here's a review from B&N:

Lancaster (Bitter Is the New Black) is a plus-sized, downwardly mobile Republican. She makes fun of disabled people. She cracks nasty about Anna Nicole Smith (granted, she was still alive at the time). She annotates her text with footnotes cheering herself on. When she's feeling particularly mean, she writes in her own "pidgin Spanish." But in spite of all her politically incorrect rantings, there are times when Lancaster is just too on-target to ignore. People who worry about Bush imposing the Christian lifestyle on everyone, for instance, should take heart from how he's raised his daughters—those "twins are but a Jell-O shot away from starring in the presidential edition of Girls Gone Wild." Even if readers can't altogether sympathize when Lancaster has to downscale her shopping "Holy Trinity" from Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus to IKEA, Target and Trader Joe's—they know what she means when she talks about the relentlessly cheerful sales staff at Trader Joe's, the tough-love staff at Target or how IKEA's going to take over America by keeping us all busy with Allen wrenches. Her humor is a bit like junk food—something you can enjoy when no one is looking.

1. Nantucket Nights

And the 2009 Book list begins...

This is the last of the books by Elin Hilderbrand and quite possibly my favorite. A complicated story, told from several perspectives, I liked this one a lot.

Here's the description from B&N:

A full moon, a twenty-year old friendship-and a Nantucket night no one would ever forget...For 20 years, Kayla, Antoinette, and Val have performed their own special summer ritual. Once a year, the old friends put aside their daily, separate lives to drink champagne, swap stories, and swim naked under the Nantucket stars. This time though, one of them swims out from the shore and doesn't return. After the surviving friends emerge from their grief, they realize that the repercussions of their loss go far beyond their little circle, and they begin to uncover layers of secrets, and their connections to each other, that were never revealed on the beach. What has made their friendship strong now has the power to destroy their marriages, families-and even themselves.