THURSDAY SPARKS: THEMES & BOOKING — SEPT. 20

Welcome to another day of bookish delight, as we celebrate two events.

Theme Thursdays, hosted by Reading Between Pages, is all about finding themes in the books we read and enjoying the writing styles of the authors we explore.

Booking Through Thursday is like a conversation amongst bloggers in response to a prompt issued each week.

Come on by and join in the fun!

Sometimes on a Thursday, I am tempted to just unplug…after all, the week is almost done, and yet it’s not Friday.

But then I visit the hosts of these fun events and I have to participate.

What about you?  What are you hoping for today?

 

Theme Thursdays:

Every week, we are presented with a new theme; these theme give us a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand different writing styles and descriptive approaches adopted by authors.

The theme for this week is

RUN , jog, race, sprint etc.

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Okay, the theme today didn’t fit the books I’m reading.  Can you believe I couldn’t find a single “run” in the first few chapters, so I gave up and grabbed A Different Kind of Normal, by Cathy Lamb, a book that was just patiently waiting on the stack.

Description:  From acclaimed author Cathy Lamb comes a warm and poignant story about mothers and sons, family and forgiveness–and loving someone enough to let them be true to themselves. . .

Jaden Bruxelle knows that life is precious. She sees it in her work as a hospice nurse, a job filled with compassion and humor even on the saddest days. And she sees it in Tate, the boy she has raised as her son ever since her sister gave him up at birth. Tate is seventeen, academically brilliant, funny, and loving. He’s also a talented basketball player despite having been born with an abnormally large head–something Jaden’s mother blames on a family curse. Jaden dismisses that as nonsense, just as she ignores the legends about witches and magic in the family.

Over the years, Jaden has focused all her energy on her job and on sheltering Tate from the world. Tate, for his part, just wants to be a regular kid. Through his blog, he’s slowly reaching out, finding his voice. He wants to try out for the Varsity basketball team. He wants his mom to focus on her own life for a change, maybe even date again.

Jaden knows she needs to let go–of Tate, of her fears and anger, and of the responsibilities she uses as a shield. And through a series of unexpected events and revelations, she’s about to learn how. Because as dear as life may be, its only real value comes when we are willing to live it fully, even if that means risking it all.

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Snippet:

I tried to run after the baby, my mother wobbling behind me on her heels in shock, but two nurses stopped us at the swinging white doors of the ICU, grabbing our arms, holding us close, our hands outstretched toward the baby as we cried, we pleaded.  p. 10

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Booking Through Thursday:

Quick–what are you reading right now? (Other than this question on
this website, of course.) Would you recommend it? What’s it about?

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I am reading Click: An Online Love Story, by Lisa Becker.

The story is about a couple of singles, living in LA, who decide to try Internet dating to find “the one.”  That elusive someone who could be their love interest.

The story is narrated via e-mails, and while it took me awhile to get into the flow of this style, it is smart and funny and full of the comedies life presents when we’re putting ourselves out there.

Here’s the Amazon description:  Fast approaching her 30th birthday and finding herself not married, not dating, and without even a prospect or a house full of cats, Renee Greene, the heroine of Click: An Online Love Story, reluctantly joins her best guy pal on a journey to find love online in Los Angeles. The story unfolds through a series of emails between Renee and her best friends (anal-compulsive Mark, the overly-judgmental Ashley and the over-sexed Shelley) as well as the gentlemen suitors she meets online. From the guy who starts every story with “My buddies and I were out drinking one night,” to the egotistical “B” celebrity looking for someone to stroke his ego, Renee endures her share of hilarious and heinous cyber dates. Fraught with BCC’s, FWD’s and inadvertent Reply to All’s, readers will root for Renee to “click” with the right man.

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So what are you reading today?  Come on over and share…..