Getting Nervous...

As I am counting down the days until I leave, I realize that until now I really have remained quite calm and collected. Though it may seem that not much has changed, I am starting to get a bit nervous about moving. I am slowing realizing the enormity of the situation, I am not just moving a couple of hours away, I traveling 3,500 miles, across another country and then arriving at my destination. The fastest I could get home is 11 hours.

To keep busy, mom and I packed the car (partly) today and made sure that all of my junk (and the dog who has the most space of all of us) would fit comfortably. I did not realize that I had as much stuff as I do to take along in the car, I am really glad that we canceled the U Haul and went with the moving company instead.

Someone asked me the other day for the list of books that we are going to be reading in the car, so here are some of the ones I am most excited about:


The Fixer Upper, by Mary Kay Andrews:

Andrews's latest Southern charmer begins with junior lobbyist Dempsey Jo Killebrew in the crosshairs of a political bribery investigation. Suddenly unemployed and the victim of a sleazy smear campaign by her former boss, Dempsey decides to take up her father's offer of flipping a recently inherited family home in Guthrie, Ga. As it turns out, the house needs much more than a fresh coat of paint, and Dempsey's ornery cousin and her dog are squatting there. So it is that the formerly glamorous Dempsey steps into her dead uncle's overalls and chips her manicured nails as she scrubs and sands her way through fixing up the house, quickly finding a renovation groove, fitting in with the locals and embarking on a romance. Meanwhile, the FBI and a pesky reporter come asking questions about the bribery accusations. This authentic tale of cleaning up life's messes and self-discovery is bright, engaging and thoughtful, enlivened by Andrews's quirky characters and lovely backwoods setting. (July)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.

The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.

Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

To find outmore about this book, go to http://www.DevilInTheWhiteCity.com.

From the Hardcover edition.

I will post others tomorrow... 3 days until the move...eeeek!