My first spoken word was “wishy” for horsey, yes, I was born with the horse gene. My medieval fetish is nearly as deep, starting at five years old when my aunt took me to see Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. As a kid, I lived my fantasies through drawing and painting, with stories always playing in my head. When the voices became too strong, I turned to writing. I have researched the Middle Ages into and beyond middle age, dragging my family from castle to cathedral. My husband and I live on and run a boarding ranch with nearly fifty horses. We no longer travel to Europe, but we ride and shoot. Thus, the research continues.
This was my first exposure to his Asian Saga, as well as my first immersion into a book that would take me into such a foreign world, and as the protagonist, John Blackthorne, I had to learn to speak Japanese, the culture, and politics. The characters are deep and vast, from England, Holland, Portugal, China to the most mysterious of all, 1600s Japan. Some beloved, others loathsome. With my theme of adventure romance, sweeping sagas, and favorite books, I love characters I laugh, cry, and bleed with. Before there was a video game, this was an interactive book, relentless and forceful, educational, and entertaining. Read all his books, more than once. My original paperback has tear stains and sweaty fingerprints from my death grip.
'Clavell never puts a foot wrong . . . Get it, read it, you'll enjoy it mightily' Daily Mirror
This is James Clavell's tour-de-force; an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Both entertaining and incisive, SHOGUN is a stunningly dramatic re-creation of a very different world.
Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, the novel charts Blackthorne's rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the hights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. All as civil war looms over the fragile country.
This is Book Two of her Earth’s Children series, and my favorite of this sweeping saga of the human experience. As a lover of history, archaeology, and sociology, as well as an animal lover and horse fanatic, I was immersed in the survival and existence of our resourceful, compassionate ancestors, making tools and clothing, finding food, building shelters, and domesticating animals. Not to mention the, ummmm, cave erotica. Jean Auel paints a vivid canvas of how the world appeared, gives us a taste of the cuisine and the vastness of the steppes and plains of prehistory. Spellbinding and engaging, I still reminisce of Ayla and Jondalar and their incredible journeys. Ms. Auel is a favorite author to listen to at writer’s conferences.
This unforgettable odyssey into the distant past carries us back to the awesome mysteries of the exotic, primeval world of The Clan of the Cave Bear, and to Ayla, now grown into a beautiful and courageous young woman.
Cruelly cast out by the new leader of the ancient Clan that adopted her as a child, Ayla leaves those she loves behind and travels alone through a stark, open land filled with dangerous animals but few people, searching for the Others, tall and fair like herself. The short summer gives her little time to look, and when she finds a sheltered…
Haunted by her choices, including marrying an abusive con man, thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth has been unable to speak for two years. She is further devastated when she learns an old boyfriend has died. Nothing in her life…
This is the third in the Outlander series and was quite serendipitously the first of her books my husband and I listened to. He checked out the audio cassette version from the library and brought it on a kids-free trip to Maui…Maui, no kids, a hot-date-night book every day and night. This third book stands alone and has enough backstory to bring the listener/reader up to speed on this adventure/romance across time and distance even without reading Outlander or Dragonfly in Amber (which we did as soon as we got home). Living history through the lens of Jamie Frazier in 1740s Scotland and the Caribbean, and the dual time perspective of Claire, a 1940s time traveler is a riveting ride, again with characters that cause me to laugh, cry and, of course, bleed out. Ms. Gabaldon is also a gracious woman with her time and inspiration at writer’s conferences and certainly encouraged me to keep writing.
THE THIRD NOVEL IN THE BESTSELLING OUTLANDER SERIES, NOW A HIT TV SHOW
Jamie Fraser is lying on the battlefield of Culloden, where he rises wounded, to face execution or imprisonment. Either prospect pales beside the pain of loss - his wife is gone. Forever.
But sometimes forever is shorter than one thinks. In 1746, Claire Fraser made a perilous journey through time, leaving her young husband to die at Culloden, in order to protect their unborn child. In 1968, Claire has just been struck through the heart, discovering that Jamie Fraser didn't die in battle.
While fantasy, this is another story that immersed me in an alien world with such vivid descriptions, allusions, yet a sense of reality and characters challenged beyond what they believed possible. Rather a juxtaposition of our world. I had to think, got to feel, and many aspects of this book find their way into my thoughts and reflections, like one-liners from a favorite movie. “The spice must flow.” “ Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death…” Whether the Bene Geserits or Star Wars’ The Force, life resonates for those open to it. I am so drawn to this spiritual, grounding journey and explore it in my own writing.
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
Haunted by her choices, including marrying an abusive con man, thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth has been unable to speak for two years. She is further devastated when she learns an old boyfriend has died. Nothing in her life…
This is one of my new favorites and I must admit, though mostly happily married since 1975 (’75, that is no typo, I’m of an age), I have a crush on Count Rostov. For humor, (the scene in the kitchen with the oranges for one), for family love and loyalty, Russian history, romanticized and gritty, this book held me captive as the Count himself was a prisoner of the Metropol. The scope, depth, humanity, and character arch, plus so many characters in this book. I listened to it twice, then read it to see the words, it was that powerful.
We are only allowed five books, it was very hard to distill to five, because so many books have and will continue to enrich my soul.
The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and…
AD 1224, remote Connacht, Ireland, is a volatile island poised for civil war, with England always threatening. Dahlquin and Scragmuir are bitter enemies, locked in a feud older than memory, neighboring Ashbury is an equal, neutral ally with both. Eloise, sole heir of Dahlquin rebels against her patriarchal society, preferring her horse and hounds to spinning and ledgers until a treasonous siege catapults her and a stranger from her ancestral home, launching them on a perilous journey and spiritual quest across Ireland. Confronting self and societal doubts Eloise must take on far more than she ever expected, finding love and conflict as she comes of age in this historical epoch.
