Visiting an old friend!

You probably think I'm talking about an actual living breathing person, but I'm not, I'm talking about something else, something that doesn't speak to me (not in the sense of actual words), something that doesn't move, it just sits there but oh does it bring so much joy to my heart.

If you know me well you know that I am happiest when I'm with my family in my home and surrounded by books, I'm pretty sure I've given it away now........The Library!

It had been about a month or so since I'd been there and when I walked in through those doors today it took everything inside me not to let out a little whoop and dance a little jig.
I'm sure my family appreciates that, I have no doubt they would have disappeared and acted like they didn't know me if I had done it LOL

It was time to go fill up my book bag with little treasures for my Summer Reading List and while I was there, we picked up the kid's Summer Reading Program baggies, they're so excited to participate again being that it was such a hit last year.

But enough talking let me show you what I got and a lot of these have been recommended to me by other bloggers so I'm really eager to get started.

The Forgotten Garden (This is the one I'm reading first, I am dying to read it)
In 1913, a little girl arrives in Brisbane, Australia, and is taken in by a dockmaster and his wife. She doesn’t know her name, and the only clue to her identity is a book of fairy tales tucked inside a white suitcase. When the girl, called Nell, grows up, she starts to piece together bits of her story, but just as she’s on the verge of going to England to trace the mystery to its source, her grandaughter, Cassandra, is left in her care. When Nell dies, Cassandra finds herself the owner of a cottage in Cornwall, and makes the journey to England to finally solve the puzzle of Nell’s origins. Shifting back and forth over a span of nearly 100 years, this is a sprawling, old-fashioned novel, as well-cushioned as a Victorian country house, replete with family secrets, stories-within-stories, even a maze and a Dickensian rag-and-bone shop. All the pieces don’t quite mesh, but it’s a satisfying read overall, just the thing for readers who like multigenerational sagas with a touch of mystery.


Pioneer Farm: Living on a Farm in the 1880s
Uses the story of a young girl and her family to describe life on a small farm in Minnesota in the nineteenth century.


Along the Santa Fe Trail: Marion Russell's Own Story
In 1852, seven-year-old Marion Russell, her mother and brother traveled in a train of 500 wagons along the Santa Fe Trail, from Fort Leavenworth, Kans., to California. Wadsworth, whose children's biographies include accounts of John Muir and Rachel Carson, has adapted Russell's memoirs of the tumultuous journey, which were transcribed by her daughter in the 1920s. As she explains in a foreword, Wadsworth preserved Marion's "eloquent voice" as much as possible. Her flowing first-person narrative contains lovely descriptive passages ("The vast open country that is gone from us forever rippled like a silver sea in the sunshine"), as well as such engaging particulars as Russell's frustration at not being able to reach all the buttons in the back of her dress ("Why couldn't they have been put in front where I could get at them?"). Watling's art pays similar attention to period details. Whether depicting a glorious sunset on the plains or the bustling streets of Santa Fe, his polished colored ink and colored pencil pictures are historically accurate and filled with energy.


The Oregon Trail
In 1846, a young man of privilege left his comfortable Boston home to embark on a strenuous overland journey to the untamed West. This timeless account of Parkman's travels and travails provides an expressive portrait of the rough frontiersmen, immigrants, and Native Americans he encounters, set against the splendor of the unspoiled wilderness.


The Story of Women who shaped the West
Fox chooses a few people to illustrate why women in general went west and what they found. An abrupt ending spotlights Annie Oakley. Battle covers the events and personalities of this bloody two-day Tennessee conflict and its significance in Civil War history. An additional source to more general books on that war, its focus on a single event demonstrates this series' strength.


The Thirteenth Tale
Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.

There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:

"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."

She [Vida] shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."

"I am a biographer, I work with facts."

Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Kalish's memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable. Kalish lived with her siblings, mother and grandparents-seven in all-both in a town home and, in warmer weather, out on a farm. The lifestyle was frugal in the extreme: "The only things my grandparents spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth and kerosene." But in spite of the austere conditions, Kalish's memories are mostly happy ones: keeping the farm and home going, caring for animals, cooking elaborate multi-course meals and washing the large family's laundry once a week, by hand. Here, too, are stories of gossiping in the kitchen, digging a hole to China with the "Big Kids" and making head cheese at butchering time.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton (nom de plume Izzy Bickerstaff) writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet's name in a used book and invites articulate—and not-so-articulate—neighbors to write Juliet with their stories, the book's epistolary circle widens, putting Juliet back in the path of war stories.

Daughter of Grace The Journals of Corrie Belle Hollister
When Corrie Belle Hollister and her younger brothers and sisters unexpectedly found their father on the streets of Miracle Springs, their shocking reunion was tentative at best. It would take the full story of My Father's World for them to discover each other in their hearts and to start to become the family God wanted them to be.

Wild Grows the Heather in Devon
Bestselling novelist Michael Phillips crafts a new historical fiction series, "The Secrets of Heathersleigh Hall", set in 20th-century England. With the coming of World War I, Amanda Rutherford returns from London to Devon to become Lady Heathersleigh. But her cousin Geoffrey comes forward claiming to be the true heir. Will he foil her legacy in the old family estate?.

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What do you think? Did I get a good variety of books or not?

I'm really excited to get started and I think after The Forgotten Garden, my next one will be the Little Heathens.

What's on your reading list for this summer? And what kind of a reader are you, fiction, non fiction, hardcore heavy reading that makes you think and what about reading 1 or 2 books at the same time, do you ever do that or do you stick to just one?

Let's chat about books, you know it's one of my favorite subjects.