The Blue Librarian

      I rarely come across a book that I end up reading in a day. I admit, I like funny romance books from time to time. They are relaxing, put your mind at ease after a stressful day.       It is a habit I took in college when at the end of each semester I used to have a round of eight exams almost one after the other and after all that pressure I really needed a brain eraser. And this is when the romance books come into play. It was over twenty years ago, before the times of Harry Potter, light vampire stories and tons of teenager focused romance literature. It was the time of Sandra Brown and Sidney Sheldon, and, much as it is today, those books were following the same pattern and story line so it is not quite a surprise I cannot remember much about them. After all, I was calling them brain erasers because they were having that reset effect.       Nowadays, if you do not want to read vampire or different kind of undead or supernatural ...

There is no need for many words to write a good story. There is no need for complicated words for the story to touch your soul. 'The spirit hour' is a collection of five short tales about lost souls: 'The Blue Lady', 'The Phone Call', 'Haunted Hearts', 'Blue Angel' and 'The Reawakening'. Almost every one of them is different but all  are touching your heart in a very distinctive way. You feel the loss, you feel the pain and the heartbreak. When you pick up the book you imagine you will find inside the Grim Reaper, horror stories with a twist and yes, some of them may scare or frighten you but not in the way horror stories do. You meet in these pages the ones that passed away and the ones that are left behind. You feel their loss, you mourn them and you get to cherish life and the people around you even more with every turning of the page. For me, Tara Theresa Hill's book was a memorable read and her collection of stories will be...

What do you do when you find your surgeon husband playing tonsils hockey with a nurse in the OR? You pack your stuff, move into your best friend spare cottage, hide indoors and stuff your face with cheesecake and ice cream till the severance money run out and then start working as your best friend assistant at the city morgue. OK, maybe this is not what you'd do but it is what Mattie Winston did. Former ER and OR nurse, she cannot go back working in the Sorenson's only hospital where the whole affair happened and her husband is working still so her best friend Izzy decides to use her cutting people skills and nosiness and have her help him as deputy coroner. While Mattie is a fair skinned, 6 feet blonde with a body that has a healthy layer of thermal insulation, Izzy has olive skin, is 5 feet tall, gay and as wide as he is tall. He plays house with Dom, a fair skin beautiful man with insane cooking skills and great sense of humor and provide support to Mattie in her trans...

When we think about wizards we think old men with long white beards and pointy hats. Or guys with long robes, long hair carrying a long carved staff way taller than them. You do not imagine for one minute a guy wearing a leather duster coat driving a beaten Blue Beetle. Harry Dresden is Chicago's first and only wizard P.I. You can even find him in the newspaper: HARRY DRESDEN — WIZARD Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties or Other Entertainment But despite his uniqueness, the business sucks. Probably it sucks because Harry is the quintessential good guy. He helps everyone in need even if this puts his life in danger. He fights all sort of monsters, vampires, demons, spirits, faeries, werewolves and opens our eyes to a different world. A world where magic exists and we need someone like Dresden to protect us. And who can do this better than him? He is the son of Margaret La...

If Bram Stoker would have read Twilight saga, he would slit his veins and call it a day. The last twenty-five years have transformed the monsters into very attractive, misunderstood and charming individuals which is in total contradiction with the message of the original book. I read Dracula when I was fourteen years old. The book today would probably be R rated and parents would forbid their children to touch it till they turn eighteen. In my youth, parents had other stuff to do than to look constantly over our shoulders and trusted us not to be complete idiots. We had one neighbor though who forbid his daughter to see horror movies, and she ended up working at the morgue. Enough said. Bram Stoker did a very thorough work with his book. It was a time when Gothic novels were surfacing and the vampires were an interesting subject. After Sheridan Le Fanu published 'Carmilla', one of the first Gothic novels having a female vampire as the main character, Bram Stoker came wi...

Much ado about nothing. I think this is the line that best describes the book. Interesting title, intriguing beginning, good characters and yet...a disappointment. I have read Dan Brown before so I knew, in a way, what to expect. Lots and lots of art, vivid descriptions, history, insights, basically you get a thriller mixed with an artsy tour guide. If you ever wondered what you can see in Barcelona, just read this book. It covers all the hot places and poses as a very comprehensive tour guide. For the art lovers, it is a great read. Still, I do not know how many have the patience to drill through hundred of pages to get to see something happening. The book promises the secret of human most important questions: 'where are we coming from?' and 'where are we going? The discovery of Edmond Kirsch promises to be earth shattering, worth killing for but what we get in the end is a big 'Pleeeeease, give me a break.' The story or to be more precise, the endi...

I was never a religious person because from an early age the words of the priests sounded phony to me. Science made more sense. Philosophy made more sense. I like logic in things and this makes me a doubter. Shawn Murphy is a scientist with an interest in religion and philosophy and an extensive knowledge in these fields. In 'Torn between two worlds - science and religion', he shows us, in short words, how religion evolved to match the interests of the rulers. It is a known fact that religion is the best tool to rule the people but to see the extend they went to cut, to deform the original thoughts into anything that will serve them is different. We get to know more about the works of Socrates, of Origen of Alexandria, how Aristotle came to be a great philosopher, and how science, in the past a part of philosophy and wisdom, came to be a separate religion, sometime with its own blind shades. In a world where long and pompous speeches are often what defines a good le...

'Dead over heels' is a short story written by Theresa Braun. I came upon it a couple of weeks ago and from the first pages it felt like a story with magic and ghosts. A little romance with a sprinkle of Wicca magic which moves slowly into the ghost territory and finishes into full-blown horror story. I must admit I was not convinced by the whole magic factor since it seemed a little stretched. Or the ghostly seeings. But the whole idea of the book, once you finish it, it is surprisingly good. With a little more details and polish it would have been an excellent story, one that I would have put easily alongside my collection of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe stories. Still, a must read if horror story lovers. For its ending which is one of the best I read in a long time. Buy book on Amazon