Shelf Quest

John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography is an extremely comprehensive, yet not intimidating, guide to how to best use your camera, especially with nature photography. It walks you through how to properly set up your camera, managing exposure, many different types of lenses, manual exposure, composition, and much more. Shaw presents this information in a very interesting and approachable way, unlike many photography books that tend to go on and on and lose you in the process. If you’re looking…

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(source) Wolfsangel is a haunting fictional story based on the real-life tragedy of the WWII massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane. It was slightly slow-going in the beginning (due to setting up and getting to know everyone) but by the time I was halfway through the book I couldn’t put it down and read obsessively until it was finished.  This book is set in a tiny French town that is being occupied by Germans, and by reading this book we learn to love…

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The Little French Guesthouse is about a couple, Emmy and Nathan, who take a vacation together to a small town in France. After a series of events, they break up and Emmy ends up spending the remainder of their vacation at the B&B where they had rented a room, making fast friends with their host, Rupert. Much of the beginning of this book is unpleasant. It’s all about the nasty bits of their breakup and I found myself speed reading…

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(source) Planetfall is…an interesting book. I was hooked early on with the unique setting: men and women from earth have inhabited another planet for about 20 years and they have a “zero footprint” way of living. Everything is recycled and their houses are actually living things. There’s a turn when the son of a lost founding member shows up at their colony. The story changes completely from there. One thing that was kind of aggravating but kept me reading is…

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(source) French Illusions and From Tours to Paris are both interesting books. They follow the 8 months that Linda spent in the Loire Valley and Paris as an au pair, student, and girlfriend. Everything is very detailed, written in present tense, and we often get the story minute-by-minute. These books don’t read like real-life; everyone in them uses perfect, un-conjugated grammar and always seems to say either the perfectly right or perfectly wrong thing. It was very distracting while reading…

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Myke did it again! Another interesting and unique read unlike anything else I’ve read. One of my favorite things about Gemini Cell were the military missions, and while we didn’t have any this time, the lack of those were made up for by the uniqueness of the story. Dead bodies with multiple souls inside, working for and run by the government? Uh, cool. This book is packed with so much action, SO MUCH, especially since it seems to take place…

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(source) Meet Me In Paris is a memoir of a short time in the author’s life; it covers a period of only two to three years. It closely follows the ending of her marriage, taking on a “married-but-in-an-open-relationship” lover, the divorce, and how she works through her own demons to learn to make herself happy. This is not a happy book. It beautifully covers visiting France and the magic of the country, but that’s where the good stuff starts and…

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I was completely blown away by The Obituary Society. The title and the cover first attracted me to the book; the title feel kind of morbid (always nice) and the cover embodies what summer in the south is to me and also something I am craving in the very center of my being in February in the Pacific Northwest. I picked it up a looong time ago when it was free on Amazon and it just took me this long…

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Blood In Her Veins is another compilation of great Jane Yellowrock short stories and novellas. Cat o’ Nine Tales is a previously released audiobook and most of Blood In Her Veins (about 50% of it) is everything that is in Cat o’ Nine Tales, just in print now. I reread some of my favorites from the first book, but mostly skipped to the new stories. I’m only going to talk about those in detail, but know that all of the…

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(source) I’d like to start off this review by saying that I LOVE the Jane Yellowrock series and it is my favorite urban fantasy series by leaps and bounds. BUT. The books have gotten…stale. We’re on book ten, and while there are some interesting things going on, things aren’t happening fast enough for my tastes. At the beginning of the series, it seems like so much would be packed into each book with several events to work around and solve,…

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