Double-Stacked Bookshelves

Teaser Tuesday:  Flawed Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Jenn @ A Daily Rhythm . Here are the rules: grab whatever you're reading, open to a random page, select no more than two sentence (NO SPOILERS), share the title and author, and GO! Here's today's teaser: "I've learned that to be courageous is to feel fear within, every step of the way.  Courage does not take over, it fights and struggles through every word you say and every step you take.  It's a battle or a dance as to whether to let it pervade.  It takes courage to overcome, but it takes extreme fear to be courageous." --page 107           Flawed by Cecelia Ahern I'm a big fan of Cecelia Ahern's books and this is her first foray into the YA genre.  It's pretty good so are! Happy reading!  

Holy moly do I love Traveling I've always liked the idea of discovering new places, but have hated the actual means of getting there.  It could have been due to the fact that I had a tendency to get car sick if I wasn't sitting in the front seat.  This was true when I was a child because we ALWAYS drove whenever we went on vacation;  Disneyland...Vegas...Seattle...anyplace within pseudo driving distance.   Once I entered college I decided to branch out in my traveling repertoire.  I had been on a plane once when I was fourteen.  It was a two hour flight to Vegas.  Who goes to Vegas when they're fourteen?!?  For spring break of 2003, my friend Dani and I decided that we were going to go somewhere crazy.  Cue Japan.  That's right...Japan.  Going from a two hour flight to a seventeen hour flight...BIG DIFFERENCE!  It's a long, exhausting flight from Portland, Oregon to Okinawa, Japan, but it was one of the best vacations ever....

We're halfway through the first week of the A-Z Challenge and it's going well.  Today is day five and it's dedicated to the letter E.  For me, E will always be associated with: Edinburgh, Scotland I remember the first time I saw the beautiful skyline of Edinburgh.  It was spring of 2007 and I was celebrating the end of a year-long teaching stint in Austria by taking a week long vacation to an English speaking country (or three) with my roommate, Lindsey.  After stopping in London for a few days, we boarded the train at King's Cross Station (the very place that Harry Potter departs for Hogwarts) and set out headed north along the coast.  It was an absolutely stunning train ride.  Then we arrived into Waverley Station and headed up to street level...and WOW! View of the Castle from Calton Hill (May 2007) Nothing really prepares you for the city that greets your eyes.  You can look at pictures, but they never do the actual place justice.  ...

I've heard so many good things about Pam Jenoff's The Diplomat's Wife and it's predecessor, The Kommandant's Girl , but I've never felt like reading either for some odd reason.  Both are set during my favorite time, WWII, and both are books that I would probably like.  Why wouldn't I want to read them?  Well, I finally remedied this conundrum, though probably backwards from how I should have done so.  I found a copy of The Diplomat's Wife for two dollars in a used bookstore some time back and picked it up (I mean, it was ONLY two dollars).  Now I can say that I'm really glad I did! Diplomat follows the trials and tribulations of Marta Nederman after the war has come to an end.  She's been rescued from the Dachau concentration camp by an American soldier, Paul Mattison, and placed in a DP hospital in Switzerland.  Though she doesn't know it at the time, this chance meeting with Paul will shape her life in ways she never could have imagin...