I knew you would like them! So how similar are the worlds of Midnight Riot and London Falling. Should I try for both this month?

Glad you are doing well now. :grouphug: I hope you have an uneventful recuperation at home! Also :grouphug: for your bird

You are the person I think of everytime I mention this series. ;) I think you will enjoy it. I forgot about the name change. I just checked and London Falling is available on my overdrive library so I have checked it out. I just put half my holds list on suspend because I want to do more spooky books this month. I also checked out the first Rivers of London book, Midnight Riot for some of you, because I am feeling a bit excited about the new book coming out and may try to reread the series. I hope I don't confuse myself.

The TV show is a bit gruesome in places also. I just went looking to link something with a picture of Stephen Tompkinson, he played the priest in Ballykissangel because he was how I started watching. I ran into this article which cracked me up. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/08/31/the-biggest-mystery-of-dci-banks-is-why-five-million-people-tune/ Normal reading me can easily skip over like you. Hopefully I am getting over some of my Flufferton needs. I will always love Flufferton but have really enjoyed many grittier detective novels too. I finally finished Murder at 42nd Street Library. I should have stopped about a hundred times. Thanks to a good review on some blog I waited for auite awhile for that book. Murder amongst authors at a reaserch library sounds like a good cozy. It was an orgy with incest. Yuk! It would redeem itself then go odd. It wins my award for the most unbelievable ending. There was a logical happy ending path, several in between plausible, and fairytale. The author went with fairytale. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663544-murder-at-the-42nd-street-library?from_search=true

I can assure you The Passage takes you all over the place. My favourite place they go is an Outdoor World near Colorado. I loved the description because we lived near one when the dc's were really little and they loved going to that store. It was an outing all by itself! :lol: This is a silly question but I loved John Grisham books back when he first started writing. A couple were set near Memphis I think and I have always wondered if the setting was right. It seemed like a place I would love to live. I have never been to Memphis. Did he do OK? I really hate it when author's get the setting really wrong. It bugs me. Sometimes it drives me a bit nuts especially when the error makes the mystery clues impossible or just too weird. So I know exactly what you mean. Btw Jenn, The newest DCI Banks series just finished airing here. It's one of my favourites each year although I have never read one of his books but did put the first on hold. The tv series is set mainly in Leeds which is close to us so I know it moderately well. Apparently the books are more village centered. I ended up in a conversation with a couple of male bellringers last week who are pretty huge fans of those books. They both live towards Leeds and say the village descriptions are really accurate. The books are considered to be way superior by them. Didn't surprise me the book always is better! What did surprise me is their taste in books. One is such a sci fi type, with tshirts proclaiming it. The other I really expected to be much more the classics type. They are going to try the Rivers of London series on my recommendation. Discussion is jokingly under way to start a Tower book club. :lol:

This looks really fun. I actually found a copy and will check it out just as soon as I have room in overdrive.

A topic that has been being discussed on recent threads is books we look forward to sharing with our children. When they were little things went great but in recent years my old favourites haven't always been a hit. As many of you know I share many of my books with my dd and she normally reads my recommendations (I am not as good about reading hers to be honest). I always know when I am handing over what should be a mega star book to her. But I am not really that shocked when she doesn't love my teenage favourite books. I loved To Kill a Mockingbird and tried to wait for the right moment. It never happened so she read it for American Lit and for her was a "get that paper done book!" Did not surprise me at all. I recently handed Gone with the Wind (which I had read a few times a her age) to her before she started an upper level history class on the cival war. I told her she needed to read it first. The dvd languishes by a telly. I love that movie and saved it for after the book. She read, reports the book was fine, but no love. The class is over too, she discusses the battles happily with dh. Scarlett and Rhett????? She didn't love Wuthering Heights either but since most of you guys hated it I can accept that! :lol: She likes the other Bronte's far better. ;) I think in some cases the life experience is just too different. My childhood so much different in so many ways. Now hand her something like Rebecca. Happy girl. Put a stack of Hearne's Iron Druids on her kindle she is happy. She reads loads of classic lit, some of it in French. She frequently digs through my stack and can almost always leave with three or four to look over. Her tastes are her own. Don't get me wrong our tastes overlap all over the place but many of my favourites from younger days have been disappointing in terms of sharing. Btw, my ds reads more like his dad. I can pick for him but not really recommend.

I really liked it. Intense but not scary

Amy, I think I may have said that you needed to read the Miss Julia books but credit for the discovery belongs to Ethel. They are great. I actually have my next one sitting on my kindle right now but seem to be too busy concentrating on the vampire apocalypse. Really odd..... :lol:

I finished The Passage!!!!! I have spent much of the last two days reading and am totally hooked. It landed on a bit of a cliffhanger and I guess I was lucky....I downloaded The Twelve from overdrive and am first in line for City of Mirrors. I ended up giving it a five star rating because it was great and I don't normally like apocalyptic fiction. I don't normally do scary vampires either, and these vampires are of the eeew variety. When I have been posting links this week I keep seeing that it has been optioned for a movie. I really couldn't get my mind around how it could be done in a reasonable viewing time, done well. Not much excess imo. Anyway I read this today https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/15/justin-cronin-now-the-passage-city-of-mirors. Interesting without any real spoilers. Robin, I may end up reading your Stephen King book eventually. It looks like something I might like.

Once, I'm so glad your daughter made it home safely. :grouphug: It really is amazing the accuracy of many of the weather predictions we can get on a day to day basis which makes it all the more devastating when they are wrong. Especially extreme weather. Just the little stuff like my laundry gets caught out on the line all the time because I believe that the rain won't start until a certain time and go run errands! I think I have way too much faith in the predictions.

Totally odd to quote myself but I found the link for the classroom lessons to go with each episode http://www.indyintheclassroom.com.

Glad that everyone is OK. :) Have you read one of Anne Hillerman's books yet? I listened to one last week but haven't read any of her father's books in years so my memory of the series wasn't very clear. I think she did a pretty good job of continuing where her dad left off. This is one where I didn't care for the narrator that much but couldn't find anything else better, at least it was a book I wanted to read. :lol: I may have to go back and reread this series at some stage.

I don't remember seeing it before and suspect I would have spent some serious time with it if I had. ;) Thanks for posting. In 2014 one of my reading challenges was continents combined with a country count. I gave up with Antarctica but did manage 34 countries ....I used both author origin and setting. Several here were doing the same challenge.

Online college classes have worked well for both dc's. Since they are both living at home with interested parents who both look at the syllabus and offer advice I know they have lots of support. They have also learned to advocate for themselves well. Dh takes care of the paperwork for both. We discussed some of the comments on this thread the other night and both dc's were quick to point out that many of their classmates have real responsibilities, jobs that support them and their families. My kids consider their living at home with their hobby being the source of their spending money easy. They felt that was the reason in many cases for droping classes etc.

Quizlet and Duolingo work great. My kids have used their kindle fires extensively without any real issues over the years. Ds even participated in a programming class where he wrote, tested, and submitted on his kindle. It was more work but he learned more that way. Coursera classes havd been completed. Short essays done. Dd does as much as possible for her online college classes with her kindle I think. The laptop is generally sitting far away from her!

I would read her books with a math theme. This thread http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/625734-math-books-to-read-for-fun/ had some ideas. My dc's liked Usbourne math books a whole lot a that age. If you want to keep it simple go through the beginning LoF's at bedtime, a friend's husband read a section a night.

I am not going to be a great deal of help because we just recently discovered Aleks and my kids are both post Calculus! We bought it because of an upper level statistics course which both kids thought was great. They have gone back and "played" in some of the other courses. My dh and kids all thought Aleks was impressive and couldn't believe my board friends didn't use it. My kids are really mathy so their review has weight. To sum it up I think Aleks is a good solid program. Like any math program it needs to fit the user and it sounds like your ds is using it successfully. I wouldn't drop it just because it isn't popular. Now the should you be supplementing question. What are your son's future plans? Does he have Stem plans? That is probably the deciding factor on if you need more because from my family's comments Aleks done to standard will make him competent. If you want to supplement in a slightly different way I would probably go for my kid's favourite which are the Life of Fred books. The pre algebra books deal with economics and biology. My kids enjoyed those but I think you could just start with the algebra book. When we did it the lots of problems book didn't exist, as a supplement could be skipped I think. My dc like Fred's story and have enjoyed the books. I need to confess that my family owns lots of math curriculum. Most of it sits in the save pile so it would be really hard for me to say one is plenty. Btw,Several of the higher level classes in Aleks can actually be used for ACE college credits, so rather like taking a CLEP exam. My kids received credits for their business statistics. That alone says solid materials to me.

Angela :lol: I'm glad the postcard could provide entertainment to all! I'm sorry about the puppies. So sad. But 16 puppies.......just wow. Stacia, Congratulations on 52!!! Hope all is well. I am still reading The Passage. It is good, long, an oddly additive. It's actually going fast considering how little I read yesterday because I found a local Orlando station yesterday and watched hurricane coverage most of the day. I generally have multiple books in progress but at this moment it's my only book. Definitely not my sexy vampires. ;) Not even sure how/what to call this one, spooky fits! :lol: Here's the review I read first https://isleofbooks.com/2012/01/04/the-passage/

These probably won't work for your 4yo but after seeing that the 7yo is a Percy Jackson fan I have to mention the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. My dvd's have an educational documentary to correspond with each episode. Somewhere there is an old thread with a link to history lessons to correspond I believe.

Remember I have the British Prime but it's one of our choices under the app labelled news.

Thinking of everyone. Dh an I have WESH 2 (local Orlando) on the television thanks to Amazon Prime.

I wasn't big on horror books until high school when I read several Stephen Kings because it was what everyone was reading. ;) I do remember checking a book called Down a Dark Hall out of the library frequently for years. A scary gothic in a boarding school. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/538757.Down_a_Dark_Hall?ac=1&from_search=true. I actually just found it in my overdrive library so I just checked it out.

We had the Abeka and it was just fine. That being said I also had MCP phonics and I think we all liked it better. http://cathyduffyreviews.com/homeschool-reviews-core-curricula/phonics-reading/phonics-workbooks/plaid-phonics-levels-k-a-b-and-c-20112012-editions. If I remember right the MCP was slightly more user friendly instruction wise. We liked Abeka math because of the colours.

To all of you in the path of the hurricane :grouphug:. I am hoping the really recent tracking that has things shifting out to sea a bit more proves correct. Lots of rain is far better. Please check in when you get a chance. I know many of us will be watching the thread.... On the spooky front I started The Passage https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/18/the-passage-justin-cronin-orion. I am not far but am intrigued. It's 800 pages long and the first in a trilogy so this is definitely a commitment! For those who don't do traditional spooky remember there are some lighter cosy mysteries with ghosts as characters: Aunt Dimity https://www.goodreads.com/series/42315-an-aunt-dimity-mystery by Nancy Atherton Bailey Ruth in Carolyn Hart's series https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2914002-ghost-at-work Jetty in the Sarah Booth Delaney series by Carolyn Haines https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905887.Them_Bones