Read any good books lately?

@ jinx,
finds herself eh? my ex found herself, working 12 hr shifts while her gutbag husband lays in bed till noon. i do love happy endings..

Hey caregivers...check out what my daughter wrote...she has her own blog. It's a beautiful written piece...with a view of what my mom might have been thinking...I'm so proud of her. Please check it out and respond if you like. Thanks.

The library provides free books in paper format and as ebooks. Great if you can't afford to buy everything you want to read or even if you can. Also there are usually lots of events and activities if you manage to get time away. Libraries also have book groups and there are book groups online which you can access any time you have a moment - as long as you have the Internet but then the library provides free access to that too!

I strongly recommend "A Grace Disguised" by Jerry Sittser. Excellent Book.

All the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, very inspirational. Erma Bombeck, humorous and funny. Watching musicals, especially Rogers and Hammerstein. Scrapbooking old family photos. Researching your family history. Machine stitched quilts. These activities give me just what I need when stressed out. It takes my mind off my problems and into to a world of enjoyment.

I'm a compulsive reader. I love mysteries, especially the truly grim Scandinivian stuff. I also love the cheezy stuff and have just started "Death al Dente" by Leslie Budewitz, which is the opposite of scary. Next in the to-read pile is something really different, the biography of the soul singer Bettye LaVette "A Woman LIke Me" as I'd picked up her recent CD.

Lately, though, with my mother having moved in and having memory problems, I've become focused on reading books about memory. It has made me think I can better understand and help her AND that I'm probably preparing for my own future, too.

A couple good memory/caregiving books: " Counting on kindness : the dilemmas of dependency" Wendy Lustbader and "Where Did I Leave My Glasses?: The What, When, and Why of Normal Memory Loss" by Martha Weinman Lear,

I also cross-stitch like a maniac and like jigsaw puzzles. Plus, I love music. Both mom and I like movies and I'm lucky to have TCM (Turner Classic Movies) where I can find plenty of movies for both of us, but I also get free movies from the library quite often, too.

I am also lucky in that I can still keep my outside activities and once every other week get out to something or another on my own. I'm lucky both because Mom doesn't need 24/7 care but also because my spouse would take that for the couple hours that I'm gone. I do know how lucky I am.

My book recommendation is "The Snowman" by Jo Nesbo. For anyone that like the Millennium series ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and the like), that series was disturbing. Jo Nesbo's books aren't just disturbing but downright scary. I was reading them at night in the winter when there was snow and kept thinking how glad I was that the doors were all locked tightly.

A couple things that I forgot to say:

I should have mentioned that I can easily afford to be a compulsive reader with the library nearby.

msdaizy, you didn't tell us how to get to your daughter's blog.

Geo, MsDaizy did put her daughter's blog. But AC does not allow us putting any outside websites on here. When I want to share a funny YouTube video, I have to say, "Google dinosaur office prank-college humor video". That was soooo hilarious.

If you hit MsDaizy's name, it will take you to her profile. She has on her Wall the poem her daughter did with the perspective of her grandma (who had dementia).

I love all kinds of books: light romance, humorous romance/mystery, etc... fantasies, light sci fi and supernaturals (werewolves, vamps, etc..) It's been years since I read Nina Kiriki Hoffman. I saw her short ebooks on Amazon, and paid $0.99 each. I forgot how her books have a way of keeping my attention on it. When I'm work, I couldn't wait to go home to read the ending. When it ended, my mind kept dwelling on the story.

Yesterday, I just finished reading one of my favorite author, Patricia Briggs, on the Mercy series. Am now reading another favorite author, Ilona Andrews, other series (not very fond of this Edge series since it tends to be a lot of fighting, head flying off, being eaten alive, being turned to another creature/monster while alive, torture, etc...). But since I started her 1st book, I'm compelled to read the rest of the series. My favorite series from her is actually the Kate Andrew series. I'm on a break from reading because I just finished reading a gory fight and needed a break from that Edge book. I would skip the fightings but I learned from the past books, that the supposedly dead man was alive. I had to backtrack to the fighting and read carefully and saw where there was a possibility that he survived. So...

Thanks bookluvr. I didn't know that rule AgingCare had about links.

Also, for something not-so-scary and light, I've been reading the silly combination books such as "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Seth Grahame-Smith, "Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter" by Seth Grahame-Smith and "Queen Victoria Demon Hunter" by A. E. Moorat. I thought they were fun. I tried watching the movie of the Lincoln one but just couldn't get into the on-screen gore. As a book, though, I just kind of laughed as I tried to imagine Lincoln doing all that.

Hey Geo, I also love dark Scandinavian mysteries. If you like to watch them, you can see episodes of different foreign series for free at http://www.mhznetworks.org/programs/full-episodes. They just started new Wallanders with Krister Henrickson, one of my favorites.

I also love Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankel, Hakan Nesser Karen Fossum. Smilla's Sense of Snow is one of my favorite books. I also love mysteries by US authors, C.J. Box (his all take place in Wyoming) and Steve Hamilton (his all take place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan).

I love these same books and am lucky because I live by one of the bookstores that Steve Hamilton comes to speak at, every once in awhile here in the Lower Peninsula.

For the other side of things, another series set in Michigan is the Chocoholic mysteries by JoAnna Carl.

I enjoyed the Smilla movie with Julia Ormond (although it doesn't capture the whole shoe thing, which I thought was interesting) and the Millennium series movies done in Norweigian with subtitles. Peter Hoeg's "Borderliners" is an interesting book, which I claim is about how traumatic the passage of time, any simple thing actually, can be traumatic to a damaged person. It was available at the libraries when it was translated to English but not sure if it's still readily available.

Also want to mention Camilla Lackberg while she's on my mind.

Also, find it a treat to read some of the older classic mysteries. Anything by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald, Ed McBain, etc... And I enjoy reading Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" and watching the Bogart movie version right away to catch the few differences, as they are really quite close.

I love to read, I just devour books. I would go to the library and take out several books but I would always find myself running out of things to read. Over Christmas I got a Kindle and it has completely changed my life! Now I have books anytime I want them and all the books I can handle. Most are less than $10.

Right now I'm reading "One Thousand Splendid Suns" by the same Afghan writer who wrote "Kite Runner" (his name escapes me right now). It's such a good book, such a good story.

For those of you with ereaders, please check out your libraries. I get all of my ebooks for FREE from my local library. It's wonderful and no having to drive to return them. Just a click and they're checked back in! Sweeeet!!

"Behind Every Dark Cloud - A Caregivers' Heart (authored by Bernita A. Glenn). It is written to encourage and shed light on who a caregiver is and how and why we are a chosen people. I would hope that it would help every Caregiver on his/her journey. It is a small book which can be read over a period of a couple of hours. God bless you. We are a special and extraordinary people.

I just finished The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. I actually listened to it on CD, and yes, it was grom the library.

I read mostly non-fiction, mainly social commentary and memoirs/biographies. I just reread two very interesting books: Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (about the reality of working unskilled minimum-wage jobs in America), and The Long Walk, about a group of prisoners who escaped Siberia during WWII and travelled on foot through Russia, Mongolia, Tibet and into India. I tried to reread "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman, but found it hopelessly dated after the events of recent years. Also interesting was "The Imam's Daughter", about a Pakistani girl growing up in a Muslim enclave in England, who fled to escape being shipped back to Pakistan for an unwanted arranged marriage. I like to know how the other half lives (and lived). Except it's way, way more than half -it's almost all the people living everywhere in the world who have a very different experience than we have here.

Yes. "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime"; a story told from the perspective of an autistic young man. Excellent read. "Girl on the Train"; a psychological thriller; can't put it down once you start.
"The Shack"; about a man who tragically loses his daughter to a child abductor and his struggle to overcome the trauma via faith.
All are so worth the time invested.

If you would like to branch out in a different category, my husband and I just finished reading John Jakes' series of 8 books, "The Kent Family Chronicles", and it was fabulous. we passed it on to our friends and they couldn't wait to get the next book.

i recently re read micheal crichtons jurassic park as i loved it when i was younger. really glad iv read it again, its so much better than the film!