I've always been a bookworm. From the Boxcar Children and The Hobbit as a kid to Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele, and even Stuart Woods as an adult. None of those genres hold such a special place in my heart as Young Adult. Self-discovery, overcoming pain and trauma of childhood, making deliberate choices about love, and life, and who we’re going to be in this world—young adulthood is fraught with the elements necessary for unforgettable stories. Since I began publishing 10 years ago, my books have sold thousands of copies worldwide and won numerous book awards, but the thing that keeps me writing is being a reader first.
I love shifter stories that feel unique and completely fresh which aren’t easy to find anymore! Nothing against the classic shifter romance story. I love and read them all but when you find something fun and new-feeling, it’s that much more unforgettable. Kelly St. Clare’s Shifter Wars series definitely does that for me. This one is a little more Upper YA and definitely sexier than some of the others on this list, but it’s one I couldn’t put down and one I always think of when I’m ranking my favorites. In this tiny mountain town in Australia, shifters play a very unique game with humans—one with stakes that equal life and death. When our girl Andie gets tossed into the game and forced to play, all bets are off. Definitely worth a read and one you won’t be able to put down once you start!
When Mum died, I inherited a lot more than a pack of lies.
I landed a $410,000 debt. Discovered her previous surname. And her real place of birth.
Desperate to uncover the truth, I drive to a tiny dot on the map called Deception Valley.
Coincidental name? Nope.
There, I find her secret family—because she had one of those too.
How many lies are we at? Honestly, I’ve lost count, but local gossip captures my attention. Apparently, Mum’s other family play laser tag every Wednesday. Not even joking. Laser tag.
I was “stung” by this
true story of Meredith May’s difficult life as a child.
She was raised by her
grandparents because her parents divorced. Her mother suffered from mental
illness. Her grandfather raised honeybees and used their lives as examples of
how a family can care for each other and work together.
This is a powerful
message for all readers. I loved this gentle story not only because of the
connection portrayed by her grandfather and Meredith but also because of so
much information about the life of bees. Fascinating to read and learn.
'Can you imagine how scary it is to be this small in a world that is so big?'
He was right.
When she was five years old, Meredith May was abandoned by both parents. Her father left for the other side of the country. Her mother disappeared into herself.
But when Meredith discovered the rusted old bus where her grandpa kept bees, her world changed forever.
Family duty. Compassion and sacrifice. Unconditional love. The life of a honeybee displays it all. As her grandpa showed her the sacrifices bees make for…
I have been enthralled with the natural world since childhood, but it was not until I had enjoyed a career as a theatre director, that my life changed course and I became a professional beekeeper. My new job took be across the rooftops of London, managing bees and hives for The Bank of England, Kensington Palace, The London College of Fashion, Heathrow Airport, Bloomberg, and many others. Now I run a small environmental charity, The Bee Friendly Trust, helping to make the world a little more hospitable to honeybees and some of the many other pollinators that make human life possible.
Tom Seeley is a genius. He is a professor at Cornell University in America, but this engaging book is no dull academic thesis.
He tells ‘the untold story of the honey bee in the wild’ with an enthusiasm that carries the reader along as if on an adventure of discovery. I was fascinated as, through the book, I joined him on his field research and learnt wonders with him. A joy for the novice and the experienced bee person.
How the lives of wild honey bees offer vital lessons for saving the world's managed bee colonies
Humans have kept honey bees in hives for millennia, yet only in recent decades have biologists begun to investigate how these industrious insects live in the wild. The Lives of Bees is Thomas Seeley's captivating story of what scientists are learning about the behavior, social life, and survival strategies of honey bees living outside the beekeeper's hive-and how wild honey bees may hold the key to reversing the alarming die-off of the planet's managed honey bee populations.
I’ve loved history ever since I was a kid when I first had the realisation that it was made up of stories. Ancient Rome has always fascinated me, not the battles or the emperors or the big picture stuff, but the daily lives of the ordinary people. You only need to read some of the rude graffiti from Pompeii to realise that people have never really changed where it counts! I studied English and History at university, neither of them as thoroughly as I could have, but at least now when people ask me what I’d ever use an Arts degree for, I can point to my book.
If you want to know how the Ancient Romans lived, what better way to do it than eat the same food?
This is a great little recipe book. Sally Grainger has taken a bunch of Apicius’s Ancient Roman recipes, which are notoriously vague when it comes to actual instructions, and put them together so that you can recreate Roman cuisine in your own kitchen.
I’m not brave enough to have tried some recipes, and there are others I’m still not sure about (looking at you, garum sauce!), but the deep-fried honey fritters are amazing!
Sally Grainger has gathered, in one convenient volume, her modern interpretations of 64 of the recipes in the original text. This is not recipes inspired by the old Romans’ but rather a serious effort to convert the extremely gnomic instructions in the Latin into something that can be reproduced in the modern kitchen which actually gives some idea of what the Romans might have eaten. Sally Grainger, therefore, has taken great pains to suggest means of replicating the particular Roman taste for fermented fish sauce. It may sound unpleasant, but actually is not too far removed from the fish sauces…
I am the author of Bee People and the Bugs They Love, an adjunct instructor at the Cornell University Master Beekeeping Program, a master beekeeper, former vice president of the New Jersey Beekeepers Association, and I have written multiple articles featured in the widely circulated Bee Culture Magazine. As president of the Northeast NJ Beekeepers—a position that I held for over a decade—I founded the “Honey Cup," an annual honey tasting competition. I have promoted beekeeping throughout the Northeast by speaking to everyone from school children to gardening clubs and civic organizations, and have led beekeeping seminars across the Northeast and at The New York Botanical Garden.
Bees In America is a great read, as it chronologically takes you from the earliest European colonists who brought their bees with them—as honeybees are not native to North America—through to the present. It’s a mix of American history, biology, and American ingenuity, all rolled into a nonfiction account that’s chocked full of interesting facts and details. For anyone interested in honeybees and/or beekeeping, it’s fascinating to learn the role they played in our developing nation. Plus, it’s exciting to read about all the innovations and advancements in beekeeping that have been discovered in America over the past 200 years.
"Queen Bee," "busy as a bee," and "the land of milk and honey" are expressions that permeate the language within American culture. Music, movies, art, advertising, poetry, children's books, and literature all incorporate the dynamic image of the tiny, industrious honey bee into our popular imagination. Honey bees -- and the values associated with them -- have influenced American values for four centuries. Bees and beekeepers have represented order and stability in a country without a national religion, political party, language, or family structure. Bees in America is an enlightening cultural history of bees and beekeeping in the United States.…
I'm a British author, a USA Today bestseller, scribbling stories since I was 13 but became a published author in the 1990s when I was 40 with a retelling of the King Arthur legend set in the post-Roman 5th century. I then wrote two novels concerning the pre-Norman Conquest era, and am currently writing a cozy mystery series set in the 1970s. I also love tall ships and the sea, particularly the Golden Age of Piracy (diverse subjects, I know!) I enjoyed the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, wanted to read something similar – fun, fantasy, and for adults, but couldn’t find anything... so wrote my own.
Maybe not a 'murder mystery' in the typical sense of Agatha Christie, but this is a delightful, cozy read, ideal for an afternoon snuggled before a blazing fire (wine and chocs to hand) or for lazing on a sunny beach (plus wine – maybe not the chocs). As someone living in a small Devonshire village I look forward to our annual summer show (hopefully without a corpse hidden anywhere!) I thoroughly enjoyed the rural background of this delightful little tale. Don't take the murder-to-solve element too seriously, instead, enjoy the lives of charming and quirky English Cotswolds’ characters, and the events that unfold around them in this, the first, of a highly enjoyable series. We need more entertaining cozy mystery novels like this series!
When Sophie Sayers inherits a cottage in a sleepy English Cotswold village, she's hoping for a quieter life than the one she's running away from.
What she gets instead is a dead body on a carnival float, and an extraordinary assortment of suspects.
Is the enigmatic bookseller Hector Munro all he seems?
And what about the over-friendly neighbour who brings her jars of honey? Not to mention the eccentric village shopkeeper, show committee, writers' group and drama club, all suspiciously keen to welcome her to their midst.
If you love M C Beaton's Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series, you'll…
1995 - “Write what you know,” Mark Twain advised. I’d been married three times. I wrote romances. 2012 - “Write what you know.” I’d been divorced three times and fantasized about murdering my ex. Only massive doses of chocolate kept my finger off the trigger. Hence…Death by Chocolate.
I laughed out loud throughout most of Small Town Taxi! Yes, even the murders!
The characters are unique and different but real…and I loved all of them except, of course, the bad guys. Even they were fascinating! Honey Walker drives a taxi in a small town…and things happen to Honey.
Another book with a killer first paragraph: “When she shot my front seat, I thought about getting a different job, but it was the passenger side and empty, so I didn’t update my resume.”
Meet Honey Walker, taxi driver extraordinaire. Honey has a few goals in life. Her first is to hustle enough fares and tips to pay the rent and buy those red sequined spike heeled slut shoes she lusts after. Her next goal is to kick her budding relationship with police Lieutenant Jon Stevens into high gear.Honey's problem is that dead bodies and live thugs keep getting in the way of her goals. While she admires the Lieutenant's well formed rear end, the Lieutenant is busy chasing the bad guys who are busy chasing Honey.When Honey's new best friend Belle, former prostitute…
I’m a lawyer. One thing effective trial attorneys learn to do is become “pretend experts” in any area necessary for a case. It might be orthopedic medicine, commercial building design, auto accident reconstruction, or a thousand other subjects. In 1996, when I started writing my first novel, The List, I decided to become a “pretend expert” in the field of story-telling. Twenty books later, I’ve worked hard to make the transition to actual expert, someone who’s studied the craft of writing so I can create a story with professionalism and skill. These books aren’t the only ones I’ve read on this topic, but they’re some of the best.
No writer’s library is complete without a shelf (that’s right – shelf) dedicated to grammar books. Breaking the rules is allowed, but only by design and for a reason, not due to ignorance. This is my favorite grammar book because it’s witty. Medicine tastes better with a few drops of honey. The important rules are explained with great examples. Learn how to put verbs in their place, find help for pronoun anxiety, and experience the joy of punctuation. What could be more fun than that?!
A revised and updated edition of the iconic grammar guide for the 21st century.
In this expanded and updated edition of Woe Is I, former editor at The New York Times Book Review Patricia T. O'Conner unties the knottiest grammar tangles with the same insight and humor that have charmed and enlightened readers of previous editions for years. With fresh insights into the rights, wrongs, and maybes of English grammar and usage, O'Conner offers in Woe Is I down-to-earth explanations and plain-English solutions to the language mysteries that bedevil all of us.
"Books about English grammar and usage are... never…
This is a condensed version of one of India’s Puranas. The 19th-century saint Ramakrishna described it as follows: “It is fried in the butter of Knowledge and steeped in the honey of Love.”
One example of that knowledge: Try as we might, we cannot know the nature of the Divine, as it existed before us. (The machine cannot know its maker.) What we can do, however, is to worship the miracle that is our own existence, and that might get us where we need to go.
This is a condensed version of a long Purana of 18,000 verses. By means of stories from the lives of avatars, sages, and kings, it popularized the teaching of the Vedas. To study it is the best of all ways to become acquainted with the living religion of India today. The nineteenth century saint Ramakrishna said of the Bhagavatam, "It is fried in the butter of Knowledge and steeped in the honey of Love."
At regular intervals through the text, the chapters being condensed are designated by Book and Chapter numbers. Each interval is appropriate in length for a daily…
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” - Goethe. As Singletasking notes, we’ve become relentlessly disrespectful of the people and experiences right in front of us. Reversing this is a mission of mine. Nothing seems more important than redirecting our lifelong attention to what matters most. As an international author and speaker about both Singletasking and personality styles, I’m convinced paying attention to and honoring each other is the key to a meaningful life and deep relationships.
Covey is internationally acclaimed for The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. However, I have a penchant for his also famous First Things First, a gem with visceral concepts that stick like honey in the brain.
For example, the brilliance behind “Quad Two”—shorthand for items and to-dos that are important yet not urgent. Because they are not pressing, the things (and people) that matter most often get waylaid—propelling us into a life missing our passions and aspirations. Only cropping back up when they do become urgent—such as neglecting health until we can’t fully function.
And who can proceed in life unchanged following his introduction of the “Big Rocks” concept. I won’t do a spoiler alert. Let’s just say it merges prioritization with a singletasked focus.
Finally, I’m a sucker for the thoughtful worksheets nestled throughout First Things First.
The authors of this book apply insights from their previous book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", to the daily problems of people who must struggle with the demands of work and home life. Rather than focusing on time and change, the book emphasizes relationships and results.
