It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Hi everybody!!!

This year Literary R&R is going to be participating in more memes so you don't just see review after review after review from us. That gets kind of old and boring, right?! To start breaking up the monotony, we're going to participate in the It's Monday! What Are You Reading? meme hosted by Shelia over at Book Journey.

For Mandy's part, she's going to (hopefully) finish reading Well with My Soul by Gregory G. Allen (for Shut Up & Read's January Winter Wonderland Spell Challenge and for review). Once that's done, it'll be on to A Searing Wind by W. Michael Gear & Kathleen O'Neal Gear (the final book in the Contact: The Battle for America series).

Kathy's just finished reading The 8th Doll by Chris Rakunas (her review posted yesterday) and Exley by Brock Clarke. Currently, Kathy is reading This Jealous Earth by Scott Dominic Carpenter (for review), When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (for the 2013 TBR Pile Challenge), and A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin.

We've included the cover arts and summaries below of the books currently being read. Enjoy!

Jacob and Noah Garrett are brothers harboring a lifelong resentment towards each other while dealing with their own compulsive obsessions. One is a liberal gay man who forsakes his family and moves to New York City from Tennessee where he travels deep into a labyrinth of sex and drugs while fighting the fear over his homosexuality. The other is a southern conservative who is left at home holding the proverbial family bag.

The story follows their loosely intertwined lives through the wild times of the late seventies and the restraint of the Reagan years in which one brother ends up becoming a minister and preaching his doctrine while the other believes there are some things people are born with and not meant to change.

Well with My Soul is told through the perspective of both brothers and shows how misguided choices can drastically affect those around you for years to come; and family may be all that one has when looking for peace to stifle the embers that smolder beneath the surface.

Black Shell is an exile, banished by his people for his cowardice in battle. To his fearsome patron spirit, Horned Serpent, however, he is imbued with the courage and keenness to stop the Kristiano onslaught. He and his beautiful wife, Pearl Hand, have fought them from the Florida Peninsula through the very heart of native America. A trader by profession, Black Shell now dedicates his soul to destroying the invaders, with their impenetrable armor, their swift, enormous cabayos, and their flashing, razor-sharp swords.

Black Shell and Pearl Hand have seen the shackled, naked, starving slaves, heard the broken promises - and learned de Soto's plans. While the battle of Mabila cost many Kristinaos life and limb, the marauder does not retreat. Now he heads for Chicaza and the people from which Black Shell was once exiled.

Wounded and pursued by memories and visions, Black Shell is obsessed with setting the perfect trap. To do so, he must use the Chicaza and their stockpiles of food and supplies. And he must gamble everything on his people's pride, traditions, and failings. As winter sets in, new dangers abound for the pair - that of a family's shame, a woman's anger, and a betrayal that may force Black Shell to forfeit his last chance to save their world from utter destruction. But, worst of all, he and Pearl Hand must walk boldly into de Soto's camp and engage the cunning monster in a desperate game of wits that will decide the fate of a continent.

A man puts his beloved pets to the knife; a family prepares for the Rapture; a woman in a department store slips a necklace into her purse. Whatever the situation, the characters in This Jealous Earth find themselves faced with moments of decision that will forever alter the course of their lives.

Always moving and often touched with humor, Carpenter's stories examine the tension between the everyday and the transcendent - our struggle to grasp what lies beyond our reach. Whether hawking body parts in a Midwestern city, orbiting through the galleries of a Paris museum or plotting sibling tortures in an Arizona desert, his characters lead us through a series of dilemmas of universal appeal.

Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina.

In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life - having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds - to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris' sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times).

In the aftermath of a colossal battle, new threats are emerging from every direction.

Tyrion Lannister, having killed his father, and wrongfully accused of killing his nephew, King Joffrey, has escaped from King's Landing with a price on his head.

To the north lies the great Wall of ice and stone - a structure only as strong as those guarding it. Eddard Stark's bastard son Jon Snow has been elected the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, but he has enemies both in the Watch and beyond the Wall. And in the east Daenerys Targaryen struggles to hold a city built on dreams and dust.


So ... what are you reading ... ???