A Booklist for those who have similar tastes

Guess what I finally added to my bookshelf!

It was so amazing to add this to my shelf. Luckily I had room.

A friend asked me if I would send her a booklist for the summer. I love reading and I've spent most of my time doing that, especially when I have access to my hoarded trove of books. Since I'm often away from my books, whenever I return I make a pile of all the books I wish to read before I leave again. This time I had a week and I put at least 10 books out, sometimes it's hard to keep track. When you're reading that fast, the stories blur and you get caught up in the world so much that you lose track of time.

Anyway, here is a list of books that I have read and enjoyed and perhaps you can find a favorite among the list. I can't remember if I mentioned on the blog before, but I have a Goodreads account, so if you want to see some of the books that I have read, they'll be on there. Although, this list does cover most of the recent novels I've picked up.


Series
Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
Percy Jackson (The original - Percy Jackson and the Olympians) - Rick Riordan
Outlander - Diana Gabaldon
A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas
A Throne of Glass - Sarah J. Maas
The Infernal Devices - Cassandra Clare
The Dark Artifices - Cassandra Clare
The Tapestry - Henry H. Neff
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia C. Wrede
The Legend of Eli Monpress - Rachel Aaron
Hex Hall - Rachel Hawkins
Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Wild Magic - Tamora Pierce
The Magic Thief - Sarah Prineas
Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle (Every single story is amazing)
Dragon Slippers - Jessica Day George

YA Fictional
Graceling - Kristin Cashore
Fire - Kristin Cashore
Heist Society - Ally Carter
Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo
Crooked Kingdom - Leigh Bardugo
The False Prince - Jennifer A. Nielsen
Rebel of the Sands - Alwyn Hamilton
Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment - James Patterson
Maximum Ride: School's Out Forever - James Patterson
Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports - James Patterson (Don't read further)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan
Island of the Blue Dolphins - Scott O'Dell
The Search for Delicious
Tuck Everlasting

Paulo Coelho
Veronika Decides to Die
The Alchemist
The Witch of Portobello
Brida
Eleven Minutes
The Zahir
The Spy

Older Literature
Pride and Prejudice
Dracula
The Moonstone
The Woman in White
Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
Armadale

Miscellaneous
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah
The Forty Rules of Love - Elif Shafak
The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak
Leaving Time - Jodi Picoult
Daughter of the Blood - Anne Bishop
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - David Sedaris
Chocolat - Joanne Harris
The Girl with No Shadow - Joanne Harris
A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Rising Strong - Brene Brown



If you have any favorite books, I'm always looking for new books to read. Post below in the comments!

The Blood Ran Red as Beet Juice

Have you ever juiced a beet?
I guess it would also behoove me to ask whether you have juiced at all. Some people might consider it a fad, another healthy diet trend that fades when the press dies down, but I think juicing is important (even fun). It's like potion-making for mortals.

And beets create a beautiful red color. It can stain your fingers and hands if you're not careful, which is what happened to me. Almost made my fingers look bruised, but it all comes out in the wash.


I'm not exactly sure why I wanted to talk about this, but I thought it was interesting. Blackberries can stain your lips and tongue. Asparagus turns your - well, I'll let you figure that one out.

There are so many foods that provide their own strong dye of sorts. So maybe I titled this wrong. It shouldn't be blood, but dye. Dyeing has been around for years, and certain colors were valued over others because of their rarity. For writing, it's important to realize that clothing and what it looks like depends on the time period and what is available. The small details are important and fun to work out, and it only takes about 5 minutes to understand the basics (within reason, physics, aeronautical engineering or some other field of study, probably take years of, well, study).

Vegetable dyes, as in from plants, are very popular and more likely what you think of when it comes to dye. We've heard of berries and bark, leaves and roots - animals and minerals are less likely at the forefront of your mind. However, there have been dyes made from interesting (albeit smelly) sources like cow urine or a combination of processes (like for Turkey red) which uses things like sheep's dung and calf's blood.

I have found that if we learn nothing from history, at least we can find it entertaining.

The Pinterest Vortex of Devouring Time

Social media sites should come with bright and colorful warning labels. They are addictive and you can spend hours looking at the most ridiculous things.

I spent about half an hour on Pinterest and managed to pull away because I was inspired by the one thing that was dragging me into the pull of Pinterest's gravitational no-escape zone.

Do you know those quiz-like questionnaire things that give you a name or some random, utterly useless information about who you'll marry or what your villain name would be? Trust me, they get kind of interesting - you'll be pulling out weird stuff like marrying Percy Jackson because your phone's battery level is 54% or becoming a Slytherin, terrible at potions, with a farting ferret. I don't know how people come up with these things, but I was inspired to create my own, in relation to Island Whispers.

First, you need to know the day you were born:

You are a(n)...
1-8    Angel             Like Angelica, she lives in the city of the clouds, Beautemps
9-16  Demon           Like Monica, living underground in the caverns close to the Haven of the Dead
17-24 Merperson    Like Adam, living under the water among the many sea creatures
25-31 Vampire        Like Grant, in the forest around Genera (the mountain)

Second, you will need to know the month you were born:

With skills in...
January - Light magic
February - Reading minds
March - Fighting
April - Water
May - Transformation
June - Healing
July - Weather magic
August - Fire
September - Ancient incantations
October - Speaking to spirits
November - Hunting
December - Bonding with animals

Third, your favorite color determines your partner:

Purple: Pegasus       Angelica's partner is a pegasus named Swift!
Blue: Shark              Adam's partner is a shark named Flippers!
Red: Dragon
Green: Liducorn
Yellow: Unicorn         One of Angelica's best friends, Marcie, has a unicorn
Orange: Gryphon
Pink: Squid               
White/Black/Gray: Sphinx

How to Handle Death and Other Grave Topics

I know that writers joke about killing off characters. If a character annoys the author (as Arthur Conan Doyle felt about Sherlock Holmes), then the simplest way to get rid of them is to kill them. It can also be the other way around. If a character is well loved by everyone, then a devious author may kill them off to create a stirring reaction. Certainly, the deaths of beloved Sherlock (in any of his incarnations) or the Harry Potter characters has readers reaching for the tissues and starting rants on social media. We can't all have a Reichenbach Falls moment or a Battle of Hogwarts, but it's important that we make the character's death mean something.

This can be accomplished in different ways.

When killing off a character, it is important to know why - and not your personal vendetta, but why is it important and necessary for the story. You could just have a meaningless death thrown in, but impact is the lifeblood of stories and readers will value how you handle a character's death.

Some readers think that authors only kill off characters to make it seem more realistic, because a story where no one dies (but there are wars and villains and oodles of other dangerous things) is too much of a 4-leaf clover, gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow story which can feel stagnant or boring (because there are no stakes). This can certainly be true. An author may want authenticity in their story, thus they include deaths of major and minor characters. Still they have to choose who to kill and that brings us back to "what does their death mean."

It is also important to consider who it impacts. This can bleed into the meaning of the death, because those who survive (especially people that are close to the deceased) will have to live with the consequences. An author can then explore what the characters' lives are like without the deceased and how the characters mourn the deceased. The realistic elements that we prize in a death can be shown through the grieving process. If someone important and valued to your main characters dies, then they are going to change - isolation, anger (you could probably explore the 5 stages of grief, Kubler-Ross model). How they interact with others might change. Or they might go into deep reflection which could cause an inner awakening of some forgotten part of themselves (anything could happen - you just have to write it).

Another factor to consider is how the person (or people) died. There is a huge difference between dying of old age or dying young, dying of cancer or a bullet wound. Part of this is expectation - do you know, does the reader know, do the characters know? If we expect something, then we can prepare for it, and although we may feel unprepared - it is a different kind of shock than something unexpected. The other part is how traumatic the death is. Violence leaves a mark and can change the grieving process, because it might mean that someone will be wanting revenge. There have been so many movies and stories about revenge - it's a prime motivating factor (albeit a negative and unhealthy one). This is why you as a writer have to decide if you want to use it.

This kind of falls in the same vein, but terminal illnesses are another way to create an impact. If a character is a ticking time bomb so to speak, then you know that at some point, you will lose them and it will have an effect on others. Depending on the illness this could have a marked effect on their ability to do certain things, bodily actions in particular. Tuesdays with Morrie shows the decline of Morrie's health and how the people around him deal with it. Certain positive characteristics of his personality stuck out more, about how he liked being touched and he always made time for people.

Death is transformation and so much more than just an end, which is why a writer must wield the scythe with care. The Grim Reaper may come to collect, but only the souls meant to move on.

We can never be prepared for every eventuality, but as writers, it's important to understand the impact of our writing and how the story changes when we use destructive elements and decide to send characters to an early grave.