I have read every book in the Lords of the Underworld series. I just finished ‘The Darkest Craving’ (Gena Showalter’s latest in the Lord’s of the Underworld series) while sitting in my favourite breakfast restaurant.

All of Gena Showalter’s books are all too easy to get into. She has a writing style which you fall into. When you actually pull yourself out of the story and look around you, it’s dark… maybe the weather has changed and did you really need to catch that bus, keep that appointment, get out of bed that morning anyway?…

The Lord’s of the Underworld are immortal warriors (and yes, I know you’ve heard that one before, stick with me) they open Pandora’s box, let out various and assorted evils into the unsuspecting world. In penance, they are each given one of the evils which they released. The rest are given to others who were prisoners in the same underworld realm at the time. Each Lord of the Underworld was created fully grown, in order to be a warrior. So they have no family, no childhood, but they do have each other – and of course, the great women they meet along the way.

Kane, the Keeper of Disaster Meets Josephina, the Blood Slave and Daughter to the Fae King

In this book the hero is Kane, the keeper of disaster. Disaster is the name (and always the focus) of the demon who lives inside Kane. So, every time Kane does something which makes him happy, Disaster causes terrible things to happen. Mostly, floors begin cracking as he is standing on them, I did think more could have been done with this in the book but it wasn’t a big issue for me.

Kane meets Josephina Aisling. He calls her Tinker Bell, or Tink. A theme with so many romance books is past pain, abuse and so on. This is true for Josephina and Kane as well. (Sometimes I find this theme gets a bit tiresome but the writing, the story and the characters save this book from falling off my list of books I will always read).

Josephina and Kane like each other right away, though Josephina actually saved Kane from hell and asked that he kill her as payment. She wants to stop being the whipping girl for her sister who lives with the rest of her family in the lands of Fae. Kane, recovering from abuse in hell and feeling the guy always left out from his group of warrior friends, feels he has finally found the woman who is “mine”.

Of course, all ends well. Kane and Josephina rule the lands of the Fae together and the bad king and queen are locked away in the dungeons under the palace. The evil brother and the disinterested sister have a story of their own and will likely appear in another book in the Gena Showalter, Lords of the Underworld series.

If you want to find a paranormal romance series you can really enjoy reading, this is your series. But, it is a light read, not a lot of depth to the story and I find the abuse which the characters suffer is glossed off rather than actually dealt with. They fall in love and all become right with the world. Taken as a good read, you will not find many which will as great as this book and the others in the series.

Get into the Lords of the Underworld series one (or more) book at a time.

My favourite of the Lords of the Underworld warriors has been Gideon, the keeper of lies. I've listed this book below. Or, you can get into the series with the first three books, or go for more and get the bigger collection if you have time for a lot of reading. These books are hard to put down.

BookCrossing: Free Books for the Finding (or Trading)

BookCrossing is a free, travelling library around the world, based on one website which started it all in 2001.Finish reading a book, go to the site and get an ID number for your book. Leave a review of the book if you like. Leave the book to be found by someone else, randomly. Or, you can trade with other members of the BookCrossing site. Someone may be looking for a copy of the same book. Whoever gets your book can go to the BookCrossing site, look it up by the ID number, see your review, comments about how you found the book, who gave it to you or why you choose to buy that book for yourself. Then the person who has the book from you reads it, leaves their notes and review and releases the book out into the world for someone else to pick up at an airport, a park bench, a bus stop, or maybe a local meeting of BXing (BookCrossing) people.

You may never have heard of BookCrossing (also BC, BCing or BXing) and that's a shame. BookCrossing is how you can find a book lost out in the wild. A wild book is a special thing, not always so easily found when you are actually looking for it.

However, wild books are not dangerous. They won't bite, or scratch. At most you may get a paper cut through mishandling of the book. Bring a book bag, one you can fasten up for good measure. Books have been known to escape after all, you just found one yourself out in the wild!

What Does a Frequent Book Reader Need?

What gadgets and tools does a book reader need? Some extra light for reading at night. A bookstand - especially nice if you're using a cookbook to follow a recipe. Magnification for those words as they seem to get smaller print every year...

Don't forget the bookmarks! How many different bookmarks have you owned over the years? Better yet, how many different things have you used as bookmarks?!

BookCrossing is for Book Readers

BookCrossing is an international network of free, travelling books. Pick one up and pass it along.

Register a book you have read on the BookCrossing site. You don't need to buy the stickers and other accessories. Just write inside the book cover about BookCorssing, explain the book is free (not lost) and should be passed along to someone else. To register a book you just get an ID number for that book in particular. Now, anyone who picks up that book when you release it into the wide world will be able to go to BookCrossing and add themselves (and a review of the book if they read it) to the information which stays with that book and it's ID number on the site.

Ron Hornbaker began BookCrossing. With the help of Ron's wife, Kaori, and cofounders Bruce & Heather Pedersen, the site was launched on April 21st, 2001.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Underlined stuff is on the wish/TBR list - though a couple that I'm waffling on haven't been underlined.)

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby -- F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina –Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabrial Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far from the Madding Crowd -- Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson

74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylivia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell

83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

via Could have sworn I'd done this before - meh.

I only bolded the books I've read. I seldom start a book and not finish reading it.

Pauline Gedge is a Canadian fiction writer of ancient history. Most of her books are about ancient Egypt. But, the book I most remember is the very first of her books I ever read: The Eagle and the Raven. It was a book about the British Queen Boudicca. At that time I just had to know more about this ancient Queen who commanded an army and sacked a city. Her husband was killed, her daughters molested and yet Boudicca fought on. Rome had to step up it's game to defeat the Celtic Queen.

The book is about other important people in history at that time and place. Caradoc, the leader of another British tribe and the soldiers and leaders sent from Rome too. I do remember the character of Caradoc (I even got a little fictional crush on him while reading the book). None of the others can hold a candle to Boudicca. She stayed with me and has never stopped being an interest of mine every since I first read her story in Pauline Gedge's book.

But, that is all ancient history. Boudicca, Caradoc and the others are all long dead. I wish the book had become a series of books as Pauline has done with her books about people and times in ancient Egypt, but it didn't turn out that way (so far).

If you like reading historical fiction I highly suggest you pick up The Eagle and the Raven. It was an epic story. I read it when I was still a school girl and then read it again 30 years later and just found more to love about it.

The truly scary stuff isn't about monsters under the bed, vampires sucking blood or witches casting spells.. real horror comes from the things we take for granted, the things we trust the most and the things we think could never hurt us. Real horror is lying beside your beloved husband at night and seeing something odd in his eyes and then telling yourself you imagined it and what was wrong with you to even see something so crazy? Real horror is your sister putting something poisonous into the sugar bowl at a family dinner. Have you ever read "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson?

I read it when I was a child. I thought it was a children's story and it was... yet it was the most horrifying thing I have ever read and the book has stuck with me my entire life. Over 30 years later and I still feel an eeriness just thinking about the book, the sisters and their lives alone with their secret.

I've read other Shirley Jackson stories, as many as I could find. I even read some of her non-fiction but reading those made me wish for more of her fiction instead.

Her books aren't always listed in the horror section. She's one of those writers who are hard to pin down into one strict genre. Sometimes I find her books displayed on the shelves for literature. I think that suits her, it's a bit generic and non-threatening. Who would suspect real horror from a book you find in the high-brow section of the book store?

Pick up one of her books of short stories or the collections with both the novels and short stories. It's a short story after all, it can't hurt.

Vintage Shirley Jackson books are better than the new editions, mainly for the book cover art. I have a huge weakness for book cover art from the 1960's and 1970's. They haunt you more, they have more romance, mystery and poetry to them. Compare book art from Shirley Jackson books - I found a link to someone who has a collection of them online. Which of those book covers would have you picking up the book and then flipping it over to read the back cover?