It's Monday! What Are You Reading #28, December 19th

It's Monday! What Are You Reading is a weekly meme hosted by Book Journey where we share what we read this past week, what we hope to read this week...and anything in between! This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well...you never know where that next "must read" book will come from!

What happened in the past week:

Weekly Memes:
It's Monday! What Are You Reading #27
Teaser Tuesday #36
WWW Wednesday #36
WOW #32
Will the Time Come #28
Third Sentence Thursday #19
Random Reads #3
First Lines Friday #24
A-Z Reading Challenge Update #24
Follow that Blurb Reading Challenge Update #25
The Reward Challenge Round 16
Follow Friday #6
In My Mailbox #28
I Have An Update #26

Week 50 Reviews:
Silence
Goliath
Red Glove
Tempest Rising
The Hidden
Sapphique
Beautiful Darkness
Eon
Eona

Tour:
Air: Review
Our Mother's Recipes: Guest Post

Random:
Opening Night!
We're Done!!!!!

So I got 26 posts in 7 days, so that's pretty good. Had a good, but busy week, what with play and all. I hope to get a few more posts, and yeah. Just need to add reviews to the reviews! But now that I have more time, I'll be able to do that! Whoo!

So this week, I want to read Darkness Becomes Her, Invasion, The Iron Thorn, Quinn, Deep Down, Possession, Size 12 Is Not Fat, Size 14 Is Not Fat Either, Big Boned, The French Executioner, and Inheritance.

Currently Listening To: Fireflies by Owl City
Currently Reading: Quinn
Currently Watching: True Blood

A dark and lush paranormal romance set in a richly reimagined New Orleans—now in paperback!Ari can’t help feeling lost and alone. With teal eyes and freakish silver hair that can’t be changed or destroyed, Ari has always stood out. And after growing up in foster care, she longs for some understanding of where she came from and who she is.

Her search for answers uncovers a message from her long dead mother: Run. Ari can sense that someone, or something, is getting closer than they should. But it’s impossible to protect herself when she doesn’t know what she’s running from or why she is being pursued.

She knows only one thing: she must return to her birthplace of New 2, the lush rebuilt city of New Orleans. Upon arriving, she discovers that New 2 is very...different. Here, Ari is seemingly normal. But every creature she encounters, no matter how deadly or horrifying, is afraid of her.

Ari won’t stop until she knows why. But some truths are too haunting, too terrifying, to ever be revealed.

He didn't ask for the job, but now all that stands between us and chaos... is Colt 

Colt McAlister was having the summer of his life. He spent his days surfing and his nights playing guitar on the beach with friends. He even met a girl and got his first car. But everything changes when his parents are killed in a freak accident. 

He's forced to leave his old life behind and move to Arizona with his grandfather. The only person he knows at the new high school is a childhood friend named Dani. And Oz, a guy he's sure he's never met but who is strangely familiar. 

But what if his parents' death wasn't an accident? His mother, an investigative reporter, was going to expose a secret mind-control program run by one of the world's largest companies. Before she could release the story, what if agents from Trident Biotech made sure she couldn't go public? 

Vowing to uncover the truth, Colt gets drawn into a secret world of aliens, shapeshifters, flying motorcycles, and invisible gateways. 

The Invasion has begun. 

In the city of Lovecraft, the Proctors rule and a great Engine turns below the streets, grinding any resistance to their order to dust. The necrovirus is blamed for Lovecraft's epidemic of madness, for the strange and eldritch creatures that roam the streets after dark, and for everything that the city leaders deem Heretical—born of the belief in magic and witchcraft. And for Aoife Grayson, her time is growing shorter by the day.

Aoife Grayson's family is unique, in the worst way—every one of them, including her mother and her elder brother Conrad, has gone mad on their 16th birthday. And now, a ward of the state, and one of the only female students at the School of Engines, she is trying to pretend that her fate can be different.

As a former Navy SEAL turned cop, Joe Quinn has seen the face of evil and knows just how deadly it can be. When he first met Eve Duncan, he never expected to fall in love with a woman whose life would be defined by her dual desires to bring home her missing daughter and discover the truth behind her disappearance---no matter how devastating. With the help of CIA agent Catherine Ling, they make a shocking discovery that sheds new light on young Bonnie’s abduction and puts Quinn squarely in the crosshairs of danger. Eve’s first love, John Gallo, a soldier supposedly killed in the line of duty, is very much alive---and very much a threat. 

Emotionally charged, with one shock after another, Quinn reveals the electricity of Joe and Eve’s first connection, and how they fell in love in the midst of haunting tragedy. As their search takes them deeper and deeper into a web of murder and madness, Joe and Eve must confront their most primal fears . . . and test their resolve to uncover the ultimate bone-chilling truth.

As a child, Jessie Lockwood spent many hours helping her mother, Mariah, count the endangered ginseng plants hidden in the local woods of Deep Down, Kentucky. There she learned to appreciate the tiny Appalachian town—and ginseng's healing powers. Now a PhD, she's made her home in Lexington, even though that meant leaving Deep Down and her beloved mother—and Sheriff Drew Webb, the man she secretly loved.

When Jessie is notified that her mother never returned from her last walk in the woods, she comes home to Deep Down—and to Drew. As Jessie and Drew race to find her mother, several suspects emerge: an agent for those who market the herb for its life-giving properties; Mariah's disgruntled suitor; and an old Cherokee desperate to protect the sacred tribal herb.

In the mist of legend and fear, only two things make sense to Jessie. At any cost, she is desperate to find her mother. And she can't help falling desperately in love with Drew all over again.

Vi knows the Rule: Girls don't walk with boys, and they never even think about kissing them. But no one makes Vi want to break the Rules more than Zenn...and since the Thinkers have chosen him as Vi's future match, how much trouble can one kiss cause? The Thinkers may have brainwashed the rest of the population, but Vi is determined to think for herself. 

But the Thinkers are unusually persuasive, and they're set on convincing Vi to become one of them...starting by brainwashing Zenn. Vi can't leave Zenn in the Thinkers' hands, but she's wary of joining the rebellion, especially since that means teaming up with Jag. Jag is egotistical, charismatic, and dangerous--everything Zenn's not. Vi can't quite trust Jag and can't quite resist him, but she also can't give up on Zenn. 

This is a game of control or be controlled. And Vi has no choice but to play.

Heather Wells Rocks! 

Or, at least, she did. That was before she left the pop-idol life behind after she gained a dress size or two — and lost a boyfriend, a recording contract, and her life savings (when Mom took the money and ran off to Argentina). Now that the glamour and glory days of endless mall appearances are in the past, Heather's perfectly happy with her new size 12 shape (the average for the American woman!) and her new job as an assistant dorm director at one of New York's top colleges. That is, until the dead body of a female student from Heather's residence hall is discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft. 

The cops and the college president are ready to chalk the death off as an accident, the result of reckless youthful mischief. But Heather knowsteenage girls . . . and girls do not elevator surf. Yet no one wants to listen — not the police, her colleagues, or the P.I. who owns the brownstone where she lives — even when more students start turning up dead in equally ordinary and subtly sinister ways. So Heather makes the decision to take on yet another new career: as spunky girl detective! 

But her new job comes with few benefits, no cheering crowds, and lots of liabilities, some of them potentially fatal. And nothing ticks off a killer more than a portly ex-pop star who's sticking her nose where it doesn't belong . . .

Former pop star Heather Wells has settled nicely into her new life as assistant dorm director at New York College—a career that does notrequire her to drape her size 12 body in embarrassingly skimpy outfits. She can even cope (sort of) with her rocker ex-boyfriend's upcoming nuptials, which the press has dubbed The Celebrity Wedding of the Decade. But she's definitely having a hard time dealing with the situation in the dormitory kitchen—where a cheerleader has lost her head on the first day of the semester. (Actually, her head is accounted for—it's her torso that's AWOL.)

Surrounded by hysterical students—with her ex-con father on her doorstep and her ex-love bombarding her with unwanted phone calls—Heather welcomes the opportunity to play detective . . . again. If it gets her mind off her personal problems—and teams her up again with the gorgeous P.I. who owns the brownstone where she lives—it's all good. But the murder trail is leading the average-sized amateur investigator into a shadowy world. And if she doesn't watch her step, Heather will soon be singing her swan song!

Life is reasonably rosy for plus-size ex-pop star turned Assistant Dormitory Director and sometime sleuth Heather Wells. Her freeloading ex-con dad is finally moving out. She still yearns for her hot landlord, Cooper Cartwright, but her relationship with "rebound beau," vigorous vegan math professor Tad Tocco, is more than satisfactory. Best of all, nobody has died lately in "Death Dorm," the aptly nicknamed student residence that Heather assistant-directs. Of course every silver lining ultimately has some black cloud attached. And when the latest murdered corpse to clutter up her jurisdiction turns out to be her exceedingly unlovable boss, Heather finds herself on the shortlist of prime suspects—along with the rabble-rousing boyfriend of her high-strung student assistant and an indecently handsome young campus minister who's been accused of taking liberties with certain girls' choir members.

With fame beckoning her back into show business (as the star of a new kids' show!) it's a really bad time to get wrapped up in another homicide. Plus Tad's been working himself up to ask her a Big Question, which Heather's not sure she has an answer for . . .

In an age when human relics exercised great power over the minds of men, Jean Rombaud, Anne Boleyn's executioner, gains the most prized relic of all--Anne's six-fingered hand. With it comes a vow to the dead queen that he spends terrible effort trying to fulfill. A high-energy, highly theatrical tale, C.C. Humphrey's The French Executioner spans 16th-century Europe from England to Italy, Germany, and France. Jean, with the staunch heart of an old-fashioned superhero and a dangerous square-edged sword, receives loyal assistance from a cast of heroic characters: Haakon, an axe-wielding Norseman; the Fugger, a reformed midden-keeper; Januc, a Croatian mercenary; and, most importantly, Beck, a mysterious, dangerous Jew. Evil comes in the thoroughly treacherous form of the Archbishop of Siena, who has need of the famous hand for his nefarious experiments in alchemy. Scenes of Siena's Palio horse race are a highlight. This swashbuckling adventure tale has all the dubious coincidence typical of the genre as well as numerous fight scenes described in astonishing detail--what else would you expect from an author described as "a schoolboy fencing champion and fight choreographer"?

Not so very long ago, Eragon—Shadeslayer, Dragon Rider—was nothing more than a poor farm boy, and his dragon, Saphira, only a blue stone in the forest. Now the fate of an entire civilization rests on their shoulders.

Long months of training and battle have brought victories and hope, but they have also brought heartbreaking loss. And still, the real battle lies ahead: they must confront Galbatorix. When they do, they will have to be strong enough to defeat him. And if they cannot, no one can. There will be no second chances. 

The Rider and his dragon have come further than anyone dared to hope. But can they topple the evil king and restore justice to Alagaësia? And if so, at what cost?