Welcome to another edition of The Sunday Salon…

Despite knowing that I probably shouldn’t be, this week I’ve actually been switching between two books. My intention is to finish both because both seem to be quite good so far.

The first is, of course, Stephen King’s Duma Key. So far, I’ve been learning about Edgar Freemantle’s back story. You see, he was in a debilitating accident on a construction site which left him without an arm, a seriously maimed leg, and plenty of mental (and memory) issues.

After his wife left him, and his mental health specialist told him it was time for a change, he finds himself renting a house in Duma Key, FL and that’s where he takes up painting (one of his previous pastimes).

The way the story is unfolding, I know something eerie and good is going to go down. Edgar seems like a tough cookie. Although he’s a difficult to like kind of guy superficially, you almost want to have sympathy for him, but you wonder what kind of guy he was before the accident. It’s difficult to tell, but it definitely seems as though he had one of those personalities you had to get used to.

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As the sun is beginning to set, I believe it’s the perfect time to wish you all a happy, safe, and wonderful night!

See ya next year!

This has been the year where I’ve truly gotten back into the spirit of reading, albeit somewhat late in the year (August), and this short list outlines the top ten books I’m glad I read this year, whether for its emotional impact or its entertainment value. (And choosing only ten was not easy.)

The list is in no particular order and a complete list of the books I’ve read this year also follows.

The Sky Burial by Xinran Xue (review)

As a young girl in China Xinran heard a rumour about a soldier in Tibet who had been brutally fed to the vultures in a ritural known as a sky burial: the tale frightened and fascinated her. Several decades later Xinran met Shu Wen, a Chinese woman who had spent years searching for her missing husband Kejun, after he disappeared in Tibet; her extraordinary life story would unravel the legend of the sky burial. For thirty years she was lost in the wild and alien landscape of Tibet, in the vast and silent plateaux and the magisterial mountain ranges, living with communities of nomads, moving with the seasons and struggling to survive.

In this haunting book, Xinran recreates Shu Wen’s remarkable journey in a grand story of love, loss, loyalty and survival. Moving, shocking and finally enriching, Sky Burial paints a unique portrait of a woman and a land, both at the mercy of fate and politics.

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Happy Tuesday! It’s time again for another edition of Teaser Tuesdays…

Here are the rules:

• Grab your current read
• Let the book fall open to a random page
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12
• You also need to share the title of the book where you get your teaser from…that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given
• Please avoid spoilers

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As though I needed to expand my TBR list, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. Plus the holiday shopping buzz got to me and buying more books just seemed like the right thing to do. Below is the product of my recent holiday book buying binge:

Blue Bloods (Blue Bloods Book 1) by Melissa De La Cruz

Schuyler Van Alen has never fit in at Duchesne, her prestigious New York City private school. She prefers baggy, vintage clothes to the Prada and pearls worn by her classmates. But when she turns fifteen, Schuyler’s life changes dramatically. The death of a popular schoolmate haunts her in unexpected ways. And strangest of all, Jack Force, the most popular boy in school, is showing a sudden interest in her.

Once an outcast, Schuyler is thrust into Manhattan’s most exclusive social circle. Its members are the powerful, the wealthy, and—as Schuyler soon discovers—the unhuman. They are blue Bloods, an ancient group of vampires, and for centuries they’ve been invincible. Now something is preying on this elite group, and Schuyler wants to find out the truth. But is she the most vulnerable of them all?

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