Jan 6-12, 2013

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin - as she says, everyone's happiness project is different, so this is her research into what makes people happy and her experiment in becoming happier over a year's time. I'm actually going to read this again and jot down some ideas. I'll be reading her second book, too, in preparation for a scrapbooking project.

4 stars
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Cat Bearing Gifts by Shirley Rousseau Murphy - this is the 18th in the Joe Grey series about talking cats. I started out loving this series but I think this will probably be the last I read. At first the stories were just about Joe Grey and how his humans discovered he could talk and how together they solved mysteries. But now the author involves every.single.person.and.cat she has introduced and it's just too much. Also, getting a little woo-woo with the reason the cats can talk.

2 stars
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The Art Forger by B A Shapiro - is a Degas a forgery or the real thing? There are two stories in this book - the main character is making a copy of a Degas that is supposed to be an original and at the same time she is becoming convinced that the original is a forgery. Small amount of sex, not blatant.

5 stars
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Son by Lois Lowry - the fourth and last book in The Giver series. This one wraps everything up in a nice way, although a character introduced at the end seemed off to me. Still, I don't have to wonder what happened to everyone anymore.

3 stars
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The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin - really liked his first book and this has some of the same characters. Takes place on an island off Sweden and the weather is almost another character in the book. The story has ghostly elements that I found a little off-putting. If a third book is translated, I'll be looking at it more closely before I read.

4 stars
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Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin - the sequel to her 1st book. I found this to be pretty repetitious, besides repeating many ideas from the first book, she also repeated herself a lot within this book.

2 stars
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Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin - a different take on a biography as the author writes 40 very short chapters, some of them taking opposing views of Churchill. A quick read and I learned a lot more than I got from the 250 pages I read of a 1,043 page book I couldn't finish.

4 stars
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The Child's Child by Barbara Vine aka Ruth Rendell - this was a book within a book, with the book withing much longer than the book without. The inner book takes place in 1929 and the outer 2011. It's supposed to be about the difference in public opinion toward homosexuals and unwed mothers in those time periods. But I found it to be more about the danger of loving the wrong person. I've read quite a few books by this author and found myself disappointed in this one.

2 stars