Book marathon

I have been reading like crazy lately, and I love it. I received several books for Christmas, along with a Kindle. Currently, I'm at five books completed since Christmas day. Here's what I've read so far:

Heat Rises If you watch the show Castle on ABC, you know that Nathan Fillion plays author Richard Castle, who rides along with a NYPD team of homicide detectives as research for his Nikki Heat novels, based on Det. Kate Beckett. The show is amazing, and someone was brilliant enough to release Castle's novels for real. We now own all three books, and they are fabulous. I'm dying to know who is the ghostwriter. I have my suspicions, but that's all they are - suspicions. I have a feeling there won't be any information released until the show is over. The books are completely done in character, though. The author notes, acknowledgements, interviews with the author - all of it as if the character Richard Castle wrote them.

Red Mist I have been looking forward to the current Scarpetta novel since I finished the last one a year ago. Even after 19 novels, Kay Scarpetta and associates are still full of stories. I liked how this book wrapped up Port Mortuary but this would not be a good stand-alone book to read. If someone was not familiar with the series, and had not read Port Mortuary, they would be lost throughout Red Mist. I do love how the characters seem to be living, real people. After all these years they are still growing and evolving. Life events happen and dynamics change. Feelings happen. There are no cookie-cutter, formulaic characters here.

Smokin Seventeen I know Janet Evanovitch's Stephanie Plum series is not considered great literature. But I still love it. The books never fail to make me laugh out loud. Is it unrealistic? Of course. That's the beauty of fiction. If we want to escape the mundane with a bounty hunter who gets lucky whenever she catches a skip, but who has two to-die-for men in her life crazy about her, one a cop and one who is basically a Cuban Batman, why not? These are super-fun reads. I bought this one on my Kindle on Christmas day.

Explosive Eighteen And of course after the way Seventeen ended, I HAD to get Eighteen right away. What happened in Hawaii? I just had to know. I read both of these books in three days. The story continues for Stephanie, Lula falls in love (and out again, thank goodness), and Grandma Mazur doesn't shoot anyone. This time. I have to say, though, that as much as I enjoy the books I have no desire to see the movie One For the Money based on the first book in the series. The entire cast is wrong. As talented as the actors might be, not one of them is right for the role for which they are playing. I just can't bear to see it.

 Phantom of the Opera Another Kindle selection. I love that many classics are free! This is a story that I didn't know much about at all. I've never seen the musical or movie, so I read the book. It was slow to get interested in at first, but soon became very interesting and exciting to read. I have no idea how the book compares to the musical, but I was surprised at the way it ended. Although I didn't see the character of Christine as such a heroine as others see her. She was actually a pretty weak-willed character.