Busy Friday with a little books in there

And I have already missed a day of blogging! Will try to do better for the rest of October. Today I did a lot of yard work & used weed killer on the stray weed trees, poison ivy, trumpet vines in my backyard. I got tagged with the poison ivy when my family's dogs were over & apparently they brushed into the poison ivy & then leaned on me, which was sufficient to make my legs look yucky. I've had worse poison ivy, but I really want to use the weedkiller before puppy comes, so that I can lessen its exposure to the weedkiller. Believe me, if I had a choice, I wouldn't use the weedkiller, but my last several exposures to this stuff have proven to me I can't handle the poison ivy in any way, shape & form without paying for it with several rounds of prednisone. Who wants to take steroids? Not I.

Grass seed is down too. And I think the Deadly Nightshade is mostly pulled up also, plus the mushrooms seem to be gone. Read recently about a local 11 week old Golden Retriever puppy who died after simply carrying around a mushroom in its mouth. Poor baby. Gives me more things to look at & and watch out for in that oh-so-dangerous backyard. I don't want that to happen to the new pup.

Have read several books, Macomber, Debbie / Twenty wishes , Harris, Charlaine / From dead to worse and Child, Lee / Nothing to lose : a Jack Reacher novel. All are gems. I like Macomber's Blossom Street novels very much. They read a little more like regular novels. She also writes romances, but I prefer the knitting novels & the Blossom Street novels. I think I like these for the same reason I like Maeve Binchy's books. They are not grief-free novels, but the characters in them seem like people I would know. They have issues, they're not always 100% loveable, but they are realistic & at the end, there's usually some improvement.

Charlaine Harris writes several series & so far I've liked them all. This particular one is the vampire series & the vampire side of it doesn't interest me too much, but the main character, Sookie Stackhouse does interest me a lot. Harris writes about the problems of telepathy in a way that is unlike the way anyone else has written about it. Very nice job & great fantasy/SF novel. Out of the various characters in the books, I think I'd like to be a shapeshifter.

Lee Child's books all have Jack Reacher in them. For some reason, I really like the man-against-the-world novels. The moral man, with flaws, but also the man who stands up for good & for making things right. What's also appealing about Jack Reacher is that the guy has literally nothing. He has independent means, but doesn't have a house, possessions, etc. and doesn't want them. He's not a man entirely without ties, however.

Next time I need to write about a new book we just got, Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims, From the original blog "a historical novel for children and young adults, author Alan K. Garinger imaginatively retells the story of the boy known in the survey crew's official journal only as "the boy Sims."" I really liked this book. So well written, set out (in its historical times), and well portrayed. I haven't read all of it yet, but a fair amount of it. I think it looks like something that could be read aloud to 4th graders, but probably very much a middle-school novel.