Book Haul/Stacking the Shelves

Stacking the Shelves hosted by Reading Reality is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks! 

I have combined her great hop with my usual Book Haul post to share even more great blogs with you so be sure to check them all out in the hop...

 I am in a Birthday Book Club. There are 12 of us, one for each month, and every month, we send the birthday person books from their wishlist. This month is my birthday month, and I have gotten a few already. I also have two B&N gift cards left from Hanukkah that I am dying to use, but I am waiting until the month is over—trust me, it's killing me!

What I have gotten so far...

RULES FOR VISITING BY JESSICA FRANCIS KANE

This was on someone's list of favorites she read in 2024 so I decided to take a chance on it

At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she's turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm's length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once-close friends. 

DON'T FORGET TO WRITE BY SARA GOODMAN CONFINO

Jewish representation is always a plus in my reading

When Marilyn Kleinman is caught making out with the rabbi’s son in front of the whole congregation, her parents ship her off to her great-aunt Ada for the summer. If anyone can save their daughter’s reputation, it’s Philadelphia’s strict premier matchmaker. Either that or Marilyn can kiss college goodbye. To Marilyn’s surprise, Ada’s not the humorless septuagenarian her mother described. Not with that platinum-blonde hair, Hermès scarf, and Cadillac convertible. She’s sharp, straight-talking, takes her job very seriously and abides by her own rules…mostly. As the summer unfolds, Ada and Marilyn head for the Jersey shore, where Marilyn helps Ada scope out eligible matches—for anyone but Marilyn, that is. Because if there’s one thing Marilyn’s learned from Ada, it’s that she doesn’t have to settle. With the school year quickly approaching and her father threatening to disinherit her, Marilyn must make her choice for her future: return to the comfortable life she knows, or embrace a risky, unknown path on her own.

THORNS, LUST, AND GLORY BY ESTELLE PARANQUE 

I CAN NOT turn down a book on any Tudor or their friends

A groundbreaking and beautifully written biography of Queen Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated second wife of England's Henry XVIII, focusing on her transformative years in France and how they shaped her into one of history’s most notoriously vilified and misunderstood queens

THIS IS A LOVE STORY BY JESSICA SOFFER

This book is everywhere...so thought I needed it also 

For fifty years Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.

ONLY IF YOU'RE LUCKY BY STACY WILLINGHAM

This has everything and anything I like in a book--murder, greek life, southern setting...

Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick, and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe and asks her to room together, something in Margot can't say no—something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious.

And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It's a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she's been in since the end of high school when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered... and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

I also received a couple of early audiobooks from the MacMillan audio program:

**A Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy ( out 3-4 )

**Our Infinite Fates by Lauren Stevens ( out 3-4 )

That is it for this week...drop a comment on what you have gotten this week...

Until next week....have fun reading