Busy Brunette's Bookshelf

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. Each week a new prompt is provided and book bloggers, like me, share their top ten lists. 
This week's prompt-  Top Ten Books on My Winter T0-Be-Read List



1. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I can't believe I haven't read this yet- I own this one and plan on getting to it ASAP!



2. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. I have been wanting to read a book of Rainbow Rowell's for a long time and I feel like this is the one that I see most often. 



3. It by Stephen King. I know I missed the train with the spooky Halloween reads with this one, but I still want to read it! I love Stephen King and I know this book has impacted a lot of people. 



4. Dangled Carat by Hilary Grossman. I was requested to review this one by the author and I am so excited about it! I have seen this all over the book blogger world and I can't wait to check it out. 



5. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. This is a book I have already re…

Author: Colleen Hoover Published: 2014 Publisher: Atria Books Number of Pages: 322 My Rating: 5

Summary from GoodReads.com:         #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with a new heart-wrenching love story. When Tate Collins meets airline pilot Miles Archer, she doesn't think it's love at first sight. They wouldn't even go so far as to consider themselves friends. The only thing Tate and Miles have in common is an undeniable mutual attraction. Once their desires are out in the open, they realize they have the perfect set-up. He doesn't want love, she doesn't have time for love, so that just leaves the sex. Their arrangement could be surprisingly seamless, as long as Tate can stick to the only two rules Miles has for her.

Never ask about the past.
Don't expect a future.

They think they can handle it, but realize almost immediately they can't handle it at all.

Hearts get infiltrated.
Promises get broken.
Rules get shattered.
Love gets ugly.





I have s…

Author: Frank McCourt
Published: 1999 Publisher: Scribner Number of Pages: 368 My Rating: 5

Summary from GoodReads.com: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy — exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling — does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story…

Author: Christina Baker Kline Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks Published: 2013 Number of Pages: 294 My Rating: 3

Summary from GoodReads.com: The author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be delivers her most ambitious and powerful novel to date: a captivating story of two very different women who build an unexpected friendship: a 91-year-old woman with a hidden past as an orphan-train rider and the teenage girl whose own troubled adolescence leads her to seek answers to questions no one has ever thought to ask. Nearly eighteen, Molly Ayer knows she has one last chance. Just months from "aging out" of the child welfare system, and close to being kicked out of her foster home, a community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping her out of juvie and worse. Vivian Daly has lived a quiet life on the coast of Maine. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past. As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions …

Author: Jill Knapp Published: 2014 Publisher: Harper Impulse Number of Pages: 220 My Rating: 5


Summary from Amazon.com:      The second book in Jill Knapp’s fabulous series about dating in New York picks up after Amalia Hastings returns to Manhattan from her trip to Brazil – and finds that life has indeed gone on without her.
     Fresh off the plane, Amalia’s feeling anxious and unresolved; left alone to pick up the pieces and deal with the repercussions of choosing her own path over Michael. Without an apartment, without a job, and starting to wonder if she’s even without a best friend, she finds herself holding on tightly to the one thing she is familiar with, New York City.
     Sometimes you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be…






Jill Knapp… You’ve done it again.

If you read my review for Jill Knapp’s first book, What Happens to Men When They Move to Manhattan?, you will know that I absolutely loved it. It followed Amalia Hastings around New York City as she worked her w…

Author: Janet Fitch Published: 1999 Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Number of Pages: 496 My Rating: 4


Summary from GoodReads.com: When Astrid's mother, a beautiful, headstrong poet, murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life, Astrid becomes one of the thousands of foster children in Los Angeles. As she navigates this new reality, Astrid finds strength in her unshakable certainty of her own worth and her unfettered sense of the absurd.



      This was a book that I can say I didn’t particularly enjoy in the beginning. The author is praised for her poetic style and yet, at first, I felt it was kind of showy and over-the-top. While I did like the detail she gave and how much she would describe things, it was so in-depth that a lot of times it would distract me from the story and plot entirely and make me focus in completely on the poetic aspects. 

      As this book had been sitting on my bookshelf for years as one of those ‘I heard lots of good things and I really need to check i…

Author: Antony Beevor Published: 2003 Publisher: Penguin Books Number of Pages: 490 My Rating: 4 (if you like this subject matter)


Summary from GoodReads.com: The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and…