April Showers Bring May Flowers?

This morning's April Showers in our backyard.

I woke up this morning to the drip-drop, plip-plop, split-splat of April Showers. Hours later the sky is darker and the rain is still coming down. Off in the distance is rolling thunder with the occasional bright flash of lightning and booming thunder almost overhead.

My dog, Dude, is curled up in one of his favorite "safe spots" next to the couch and my bookshelves. Dude, as a pup, eagerly jumped into a neighbor's pool, but now as a two year old "mature dog" he avoids water in most every form, including rain.




Dude waiting for the April Showers to end.

My other dog, Shani, is older and wiser and doesn't mind the rain all that much. She's already ventured outside and then came back inside to shake off all that rain. Ahh, the smell of wet dog.

Dude, on the other hand, will wait all day before he risks the onslaught of those chilly raindrops. He doesn't seem to mind the lightning or thunder today, but the rain, well, that's just not his thing.





Some of my potted flowers soaking up the rain.



My potted flowers are happily soaking up all that nourishing rain. The grass, under a blanket of fallen oak leaves, should be happy too. And then there are all those giant oak trees that need lots and lots of rain.

Now the tourists on the beach, those Spring Breakers who came here for all that Florida sunshine, well, they won't find any sun today. A few hardy souls will venture out in rain gear to walk along the beach, but the rest will sit in hotel rooms and condos watching their vacation time drip away.

Shani showing little concern for the April Showers.

I thought about going over the bridge to take a few photos of the rain-drenched beach, but then decided Dude has the right idea about staying warm and dry inside. This is a perfect day to curl up with a good book and listen to the rain.

Hmm! So what am I going to read today? I'll probably alternate between Bernard Cornwell's 1356 that I checked out from my local library and Susanna Kearsley's The Shadowy Horses which I'm reading on my Kindle Fire. I'm almost always reading more than one book.


If you want to see the books I've been reading lately, mostly historical fiction these past few months, check out my Goodreads page: Teri Heyer on Goodreads

I checked Amazon/Kindle this morning to see if there were any April Showers books and found the three listed below. All three are romances (in no particular order):

April Showers by Ann LeValley
April Showers (HQ, A Valley Ridge Wedding) by Holly Jacobs
April Showers (Twelve Months of Romance - April) by Margaret Lake *

*Just added to my Kindle

Well, the rain has been going on for hours and hours with no end in sight. I guess it's time to settle into my recliner and read for a while. Here in Florida, these April Showers are sure to bring a riot of May Flowers.

Ecstatic About Books

Two of my bookshelves.

I have to confess, I am ecstatic, passionate, giddy about books. Between the books on my bookshelves and the ones on my two Kindles, I have more books than I can read in two lifetimes. So in reality, I guess that I am obsessed with books.

Well, as I've pointed out before, I have my mother to blame for my obsession, passion, love of books. At a very early age she read not only the standard fairy tales to me, but the wonderful stories by O'Henry and Terhune. When I could read on my own I took off like a racehorse and never looked back.

In two of my August posts, "Crazy About Books" and "In Love with Books," I gave a guided tour of three of my bookshelves.  Well, this post is a guided tour of my last two bookshelves. All my other books live in boxes under the bed in the guestroom, in boxes and stacks in the guestroom closet, on my Kindles, or in the Cloud. More books than I care to count, but still never enough.  There are just so many great books out there, that I keep buying more.

You can imagine my husband's relief when I started buying more eBooks than paper books. At least the next time we move there won't be additional boxes of books to lug around. I think with our last move, from the Texas Hill Country to the Florida Gulf Coast, I had approximately twenty-seven very heavy boxes of books. But all those zillions of eBooks can be carried around in my purse. I have to say that's awesome!

So here's the guided tour of the bookshelves in the photo above. Obviously there are too many books to list them all, so I'll only list a few of them. The top shelves have "treasures" collected through the years, but the other shelves are packed with books and magazines.

Left bookshelf from top to bottom:

Clouds and Eclipses (The Collected Short Stories) by Gore Vidal
New Stories from the South (2007 - The Year's Best) ed. by Edward P. Jones
New Stories from the South (2008 - The Year's Best) ed. by Z. Z. Packer
Like unto Like by Sherwood Bonner
Mothers & Daughters (An Anthology) ed. by Alberto Manguel
American Avenue, Rhythm & Reason (A Collection) by William Steding
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Best American Short Stories (2006) ed. by Ann Patchett
The Best American Short Stories (2009) ed. by Alice Sebold
Half in Love (Stories) by Maile Meloy
Best American Voices (2003) guest editor, Joyce Carol Oates
Best American Voices (2004) guest editor, John Casey
Best New American Voices (2006) ed. by Jane Smiley
Best New American Voices (2007) ed. by Sue Miller
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Selected by Malcolm Cowley
Girl with a Pearl Earring (A Novel) by Tracy Chevalier
The Lady and the Unicorn (A Novel) by Tracy Chevalier
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
The Forest Lover (A Novel) by Susan Vreeland

Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer
The Day the Cowboys Quit by Elmer Kelton
The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton
Sandhills Boy (The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer) by Elmer Kelton
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Shane by Jack Schaefer
Education of a Wandering Man (A Memoir) by Louis L'Amour
Louis L'Amour's wonderful books (54 of them on this shelf, too many to list)
The Great Trek by Zane Grey
Shower of Gold by Zane Grey
The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas
The White Witch of Rosehall by Herbert G. de Lissor

Southwest Art (Magazine) (two stacks, several years)

Art of the West (Magazine) (one stack, several years)
Southwest Art (Magazine) (one stack, several years)

Right bookshelf from top to bottom:

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Revised Ed.) ed. by Hardin Craig
Masters of Modern Drama ed. by Haskell M. Block & Robert G. Shedd
A Field Guide to Central Australia by Penny van Oosterzee
Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways by National Geographic
Guide to the National Parks of the United States by National Geographic
A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies by Roger Tory Peterson
Seashells of North America (A Guide to Field Identification) by R. Tucker Abbott

House Plants (How to choose, grow, display) by Sunset
Introduction to Basic Gardening by Sunset
The House Book by Terence Conran
Illustrated Guide to Gardening by Reader's Digest
Best Loved Garden Plants by David Myers, Lance Hattatt & Lindsay Bousfield
Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel by Cathy Yardley
How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author by Janet Evanovich with Ina Yalof
Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers by Susan Shaughnessy
Handbook of Short Story Writing by The Writer's Digest
Handbook of Short Story Writing - Volume II by The Writer's Digest
Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434 by Lew Hunter
Character Naming Sourcebook by The Writer's Digest

Art Books (48 of them, which I'll save for another blog post about art and art books)

American Art Review (Magazine) (one stack, several years)
Birds & Blooms (Magazine) (one year)
Hallowed Ground (The Civil War Preservation Trust Magazine) (one year)
American Art Collector (Magazine) (one year)
Country Lifestyle (Magazine) (one year)
Plus an assortment of other art magazines.

I hope you've enjoyed the guided tour of my bookshelves. Please check back for other blog posts, because I'm always talking about books.

In Love with Books

My guest room bookshelf.

Yes, I can honestly say I am in love with books. This is a love affair that began when I was a small child and has continued all my life. For this reason, I have numerous bookshelves filled with every kind of books imaginable.

Most of these books were collected over the last thirty years. That's the number of years my husband and I have been married. Oh my, has it really been thirty years? Well, that's certainly something to save for a future post. This one is all about my love of books.

The other day I realized that readers, those who are also in love with books, might be interested in what books grace my bookshelves. So I started this guided tour with my previous post, "Crazy About Books."

Let me explain. We, my husband and I and our two dogs, live in a small older house. There's not a lot of extra space, but I still have five overcrowded bookshelves. Two are in the living room, one in the guest room and two in the computer room (aka, "man cave," that's my husband's room, but I have bunches of books there, just sayin').  My post, "Crazy About Books," gives you a guided tour of my living room bookshelves.

In this post, "In Love with Books," it's a guided tour of the bookshelf in the guest room (see the picture above).  There are too many books to list them all here, so I'll just list a selection of them.  I love history books, classics, romances, literary fiction, just about everything. So this is what you'll find on this particular bookshelf. These shelves have double rows, so there are lots of books that can't be seen in the picture.

A guided tour, shelf by shelf, from top to bottom:

Washington's War by Michael Rose
The Pirate Queen (Queen Elizabeth I) by Susan Ronald
The Oxford History of the French Revolution by William Doyle
The Penguin History of Medieval Europe by Maurice Keen
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades Ed. by Jonathan Riley-Smith
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings Ed. by Peter Sawyer
Eleanor of Aquitaine, A Biography by Marion Meade
Queen Victoria at Home Michael De-la-Noy
The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk
Savage Kingdom (Jamestown) by Benjamin Woolley
The Pursuit of Glory by Tim Blanning

Queen Victoria's Little Wars by Byron Farwell
Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell
Russia Under the Old Regime by Richard Pipes
The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans
Hell Hath No Fury by Rosalind Miles & Robin Cross
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence
The Valleys of the Assassins by Freya Stark
A Winder in Arabia by Freya Stark
The White Nile by Alan Moorehead
The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Middlemarch by George Eliot
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Lady Chatterley's Love by D. H. Lawrence

The Defector by Daniel Silva
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
100 Selected Stories O Henry
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart
The Fallen Angels by Bernard Cornwell & Susannah Kells
Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

Given a choice, I would have wall to wall bookshelves in my house. But my husband isn't in love with books like I am. So for now I'll settle for five bookshelves and then too-many-to-count boxes of books.

If you're in love with books like I am, I hope you'll add a comment below. What books are on your bookshelves? I'm sure all of us readers would love to know.

Crazy About Books

My living room bookshelves.

I have been crazy about books ever since I was a small child, years before I could read a book on my own. Why? Because my mom read to me from the very beginning. She read more than just nursery rhymes and fairy tales. She read short stories from magazines and anthologies to my brother and I. But best of all, she read us the wonderful stories by O'Henry and Terhune.

My earliest memories include O'Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Redchief." How could I not fall in love with books? How could I not become crazy about books?

I fell in love with the library when I was just a toddler. Mom would take me there and we'd sit on the rug on the library floor and go through one book after another. She'd read bunches of books to me before we selected the ones to take home. Honestly, I think my mom should get a medal for reading a record number of books to my brother and I.

When I could finally read on my own, a whole new world was opened up to me. I still remember the first day I read a book that didn't have any illustrations. How would I know what the characters and the scenery looked like? Mom's response, "You create the pictures in your head." Of course! I'd already been creating my own stories in my head, so it only made sense that I could do that with the books I read.

I raced through the Betsy Tacy books, Little House on the Prairie books, Little Women, Nancy Drew, and every book I could find about horses. Favorites were Savage Sam, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Enormous Egg, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, Silver for General Washington, Johnny Tremaine, The Bronze Bow, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Heidi, The Little Princess, Misty of Chincoteague,  I could go on and I. Suffice to say, you could name a book and I probably read it way back then.

So now we get to the fact that as an adult I'm still crazy about books. When my husband and I moved from the Texas Hill Country back to the Florida Gulf Coast a few years ago, I had twenty-seven very heavy boxes of books. That was after I took bags of books, mostly paperbacks, to the library. The packed boxes were so heavy they required a dolly to cart them onto the U-Haul.

Now that we're contemplating a future move, my husband has already said, "I'm not moving all those books again." I just smile sweetly. I'll give away a few books and pack the rest in smaller boxes. And next time, maybe I won't number the book boxes?

The books on my living room bookshelves are my most treasured tomes, many of them hardbacks. Most have been moved across country and back, from Florida to Las Vegas to St. Simons Island to Florida to the Texas Hill Country back to Florida once again. Mind you, that's thirty years of moving back and forth across the country. Thirty years of collecting more and more books.

What books have I been carting around and collecting for years? Well, there's a heck of a lot of them.  I'm not about to list them all, at least not on this post, but you'll find lists below of some of the books on my living room bookshelves shown in the picture above.

I decided the best way to do this is to give you a guided tour of my living room bookshelves, which is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. I love reading history, so there are a lot of really great books on those shelves. Also, some great fiction and short story anthologies. So here goes. I hope you find something that you'll want to add to your own book collections.

Left bookshelf (a selection of books from the top shelf down):

1848, Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport
Worlds at War by Anthony Pagden
The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans
Postwar, A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
Gellhorn, A Twentieth Century Life by Caroline Moorehead
A History of the Jews of the Modern World by Howard M. Sachar
A World Undone, The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 by C. J. Meyer
Cobra II by Michael R. Gordon & General Bernard E. Trainor
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll
Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden

On Call in Hell, A Doctor's Iraq War Story by CDR. Richard Jadwick
Fiasco,  The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks
Germs by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg & William Broad
Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile
The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Vietnam, A History by Stanley Karnow
O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson
1776 by David McCullough
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin
Washington by James Thomas Flexner
John Adams by David McCullough
Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose
Plymouth Colony by Eugene Aubrey Stratton
A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman
The Crucible of War by Fred Anderson
Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones

The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England Ed. by Nigel Saul
The Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis
Scotland, A Concise History by Fitzroy MacLean
Scottish Battles, From Mons Graupius to Culloden by John Sadler
Victoria's Daughters by Jerrold M. Packard
Born to Rule, Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria by Julia P. Gelardi
The Hollow Crown by Miri Rubin
The Ancient Celts by Barry Cunliffe
Robert the Bruce, King of Scots by Ronald McNair Scott
Castles and Keeps of Scotland by Frank Roy Fraprie
Mirage, Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt by Nina Burleigh
An Illustrated History of the Crusades and the Crusader Nights Ed. by Charles Phillips

The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain Ed. by Kenneth O. Morgan
History of Art (Fifth Ed. Revised) by H. W. Janson & Anthony F. Janson
The Book of 1,000 Poems by Wings Books
An assortment of art books on Gauguin, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo and many others.

Right bookshelf (a selection of books from the top shelf down):

Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo
Turtle Moon by Alice Hoffman
Anthem by Ayn Rand
The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
Sons of Liberty by Marie Jakober
Only Call Us Faithful by Marie Jakober
Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller
The Geometry of Sisters by Luanne Rice
The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners by Luanne Rice
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Unlikely Soldier by Gerald Seymour
Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva
The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough

Wild and Wooly, An Encyclopedia of the Old West by Denis McLaughlin
Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
The Lance and the Shield, The Life and Times of Sitting Bull by Robert M. Utley
Lone Star Justice, The First Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley
Commanches, The History of a People by T. R. Fehrenbach
Black Elk Speaks by John G Neihardt
Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz
Three Roads to the Alamo by William O. Davis
The Trail of Tears by Gloria Jahoda
Frontier Texas, History of a Borderland to 1880 by Robert F. Pace & Donald S. Frazer
Indian Wars by Robert M. Utley & Wilcomb E. Washburn
The Captured by Scott Zesch
The Chisholm Trail by Wayne Gard
The Longhorns by Frank J. Dobie
The Mustangs by Frank J. Dobie

The Oxford Book of American Poetry Chosen & Ed. by David Lehman
Contemporary Fiction, 50 Short Stories Since 1970 Ed. by Lex Williford & Michael Martone
The World of the Short Story, A 20th Century Collection Selected & Ed. by Clifton Fadiman
The Wordsworth Collection of Classic Short Stories Selected by Rosemary Gray
Lone Star Rising, The Texas Rangers Trilogy by Elmer Kelton
Ranger's Law, A Lone Star Saga by Elmer Kelton
The Pushcart Book of Short Stories Ed. by Bill Henderson
The Art of the Story Ed. by Daniel Halpern
The Art of the Tale Ed. by Daniel Halpern
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (The Finca Vigia Ed.) by Ernest Hemingway
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story Ed. by Richard Ford
A Century of Great Western Stories, An Anthology of Western Fiction Ed. by John Jakes

Nothing But Victory, The Army of the Tennessee 1861-1865 by Steven E. Woodworth
Personal Memoirs Ulysses S. Grant Ed. by Caleb Carr
The Sword of Lincoln by Jeffrey D. Wert
The Coming Fury by Bruce Catton
Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton
Never Call Retreat by Bruce Catton
Sherman's March by Burke Davis
Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears
Gray Fox, Robert E. Lee and The Civil War by Burke Davis
The New Annals of The Civil War Ed. by Peter Cozzens & Robert I. Girardi

The West, An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward
The Time-Life Series on The Civil War
Plus books on art, history, guns, birds, wildlife and more.

This is only about half the books on these two bookshelves. Remember, this is a collection gathered over a period of thirty years. By now you're saying, "She really is crazy about books." You're also most likely sympathizing with my husband about carting all those books around every time we move. And no, I'm not about to get rid of any of the books on these two bookshelves.

I'd love to hear from others who are crazy about books too. So please add your comments below.

Note: For those who might be interested, the art on the bookshelves were all painted by me with the exception of the watercolor of potted flowers which was painted by my mom. By the way, she's an incredible artist, but I'll save that for another post. The wood carvings and other paraphernalia were collected through the years.