Cover Reveal Announcement ~ Opal

Tomorrow, Friday September 21 2012, I will be able to reveal to you the cover of the 3rd novel in the Lux series, Opal.

Yes... you just read that correctly.  I have been picked to help share the Lux love and have been given a copy of the cover to share with all of you.  I can not wait to hit the publish button on the post because I believe you will all be just as excited as I am after seeing it.  It is simply perfect!

So be sure to check back tomorrow to take a look. I promise you will not regret it.  I have loved every single cover in the series but I have to say that this will be by far my favorite yet.  Stunning!

Oxford Weekend and Deborah Harkness

Well I am back from Oxford and Woodstock!  We had so much fun on our weekend trip and it was amazing to be at St Mary Magdalene's Church for the evening reading of Shadow of Night with Deborah Harkness.

The highlight in Oxford was our tour of the Bodleian Library, what an amazing place.  You walk in and you can immediately smell the old books and manuscripts. Could have stayed there for ages...


When we travelled over to Woodstock we could tell this was going to be a special night. The setting was amazing and the village was beautiful and quaint.


Deborah was such a lovely woman and came across as being so kind and you can obviously tell how intelligent she is. She stayed after to sign copies of all the books and to further answer questions. If anybody has the opportunity to go to one of her signings or readings I would strongly suggest that they go. Was a great experience.


If you would like to see the rest of the photos from our trip you can find them all HERE.

The Blenheim Palace Literary Festival at Woodstock

I am so excited about my plans for this weekend and really just wanted to share my excitement with everybody.  A few friends from work and I will be driving down to Oxford so that we can go to The Blenheim Palace Literary Festival at Woodstock.  I mean really... How beautiful is this setting?

Earlier this year another friend at work suggested that I read a book that she had fallen in love with.  That book was A Discovery of Witches.   To say I fell head over heels in love was an understatement!  Then shortly after I read book one of The All Souls Trilogy, book 2 Shadow of Night was released.  I fell in love all over again...

          
A little over a month ago I found out that the author, Deborah Harkness, was to be in attendance at the Literary Festival on September 15th.  Well I knew that the Lauras and I just had to go!  Yes, all three of my friends from work are named Laura, you would think this would be confusing but somehow it just isn't.  So... a plan was hatched for a Christine and three Lauras to drive the three hour drive down to Oxford to meet Deborah Harkness.

Here is a blub about the book reading that we are so fortunate to be attending...

A candlelit church at the dead of night is the perfect venue for a spooky introduction to Professor Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy. Historian Harkness has flown over from the United States to be at the festival to talk about her trilogy, which follows the story of Diana Bishop, a historian and reluctant witch who falls in love with mysterious vampire Matthew Clairmont. The All Souls Trilogy began with A Discovery of Witches, which went straight to number two on the New York Times bestseller list and is now being turned into a Hollywood movie. The second volume, Shadow of Night, which features an opening sequence in Woodstock, is now out in the UK.


Harkness is a scholar and student of history. She has researched the history of magic and science in Europe, especially between 1500 and 1700, and has spent spells researching at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and All Souls College Library.  She wrote works of non-fiction, including the award-winning The Jewel House about the practice of Elizabethan science, before turning to her novels. Her career in fiction began when she says she began to wonder ‘if there really are vampires, what do they do for a living?’ Prepare to be spooked!


Since we are going to be in and around Oxford I have also put together a full walking tour of all of the Discovery of Witches locations so that we can walk in the footsteps of Diana and Matthew.


While we are there we will be seeing All Souls College, The Bridge of Sighs, New College, the Covered Market and we will be taking a tour of the magnificent Bodleian Library.


So... as you can tell I am very excited!  We are going to have a lot of fun this weekend and I hope to be able to share a lot of great photos and memories with everybody after we return.

Whatever your plans are for this weekend I hope they are filled with a lot of fun and lots of book goodness!

New Weekly Feature ~ Book Blogger Spotlight

Hi Everybody!

I have been busy this week putting together the final touches of a new Weekly Feature that I will be starting here at Rainy Day Reads, it is called Book Blogger Spotlight.

A lot of hard work goes into keeping a book blog up to date and wonderful.  I would like to use this weekly feature as a way of putting fellow bloggers in the spotlight to learn a little bit more about them and their blogs.

If you are a fellow book blogger and would like to be in my Book Blogger Spotlight then please fill out THIS FORM and I will be in touch when it is your turn to be in the spotlight.

I plan on running this feature on Sundays and will be posting the first one later today, so be on the look out for the first lucky participate.  This has been a lot of fun to put together and I think we will all find some wonderful people and blogs that maybe we didn't know about before and hopefully some new great books we can all share in the love of.

Hello New Followers!

I have had this site up and running now for around four days and I have 67 new fellow book lovers following me!  This makes me very happy and I wanted to give a BIG thank you to each and every one of you... and of course a BIG thank you to all of my future followers as well.

I have been spending quite a bit of time getting Rainy Day Reads up and running and I think for now it is in a good place... which means I can focus a bit more on the actual 'reading' part of having a book blog.  I am currently 54% through City of Lost Souls.  I should have it finished this weekend and you can expect a new review very soon.

I think we are all going to have a lot of fun together!  Of course I am open to any suggestions or thoughts from those of you who have been running successful book blogs and from those of you who are not your suggestions are equally important to me.  Again I thank you all for following, it really has helped show me this will all be worth it.