For more music mashups, check out DJ Earworm’s YouTube channel.

I’m previewing Rihanna’s 6th upcoming album Talk That Talk, and I’m totally digging it! Rihanna signed on to Jay-Z’s Def Jam Records back in 2005, and six years later she’s gearing up to release her sixth solo album. Rihanna has already earned her 11th No. 1 hit with We Found Love from this album. You can watch the critically-acclaimed music video here. Some of the tracks I have on repeat right now is Drunk On Love, Roc Me Out, Talk That Talk featuring Jay-Z, We Found Love featuring Calvin Harris, and Farewell.

While Rihanna’s Talk That Talk isn’t a record that you’re going to want to listen to with the kiddies in the room (at least not sans EARMUFFS!), it’s far and away the most cohesive album that she’s recorded to date. It’s not a concept record, per se, but the thematic consistency of this album’s lyrical content [...] from start to finish, the most aurally satisfying record of the six full-length albums she has released.

Pre-order Rihanna’s album Talk That Talk (Deluxe Edition), available on iTunes on November 21.

Its been scorching hot for the past couple of weeks and it finally cooled down a little today. I woke up late in the afternoon because it’s finally Saturday and I could catch some zzz’s before I dive into my weekend. I took my time crawling out of bed, spent extra time in the shower because it felt great to play with water (even though its bad to run up the bill — its such a great comfort I couldn’t help it), and finally settled down in the kitchen with my cup of coffee staring out to our backyard.

Our yard is plainfully small. Most of the area is taken up by the wooden porch. To the right of the yard, there is my boyfriend’s small koi pond, a few small fruit trees, and some potted plants. That’s about all the foliage that exists in our yard. I hardly look outside because frankly, there isn’t much to see. But today, there was a slight breeze that rattled the little branches of the trees which made me realize how much the season’s changed. With the wacky weather around here, I could hardly remember spring. Felt like the season jumped from winter straight into the middle of summer! Now, everything is so green outside. It reminds me of a book I once saw, Gertrude Jekyll & The Country House Garden by Judith B. Tankard. Gosh, how I wish I could have an ounce of that talent to plant my own little piece of heaven.

Photographs: © Country Life Picture Library, from Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden by Judith B. Tankard, Rizzoli New York, 2011.

I love to read but with so many distractions in my life, I hardly have time to pick up a book. So my sister suggested audiobooks (such as Audible). She’s been wanting to read The Help by Kathryn Stockett but hasn’t had much time either. So her coworker lent her a copy of the audiobook so she could listen while driving to work or at the gym. She loved it so much she passed it on to me. I popped in the first disc this morning for my daily commute and now I’m hooked! It was weird at first, trying to adjust to someone reading the story to me. But after a while, I got used to the narrators’ voices and even started speaking like the person reading to me in my head!

In a nutshell, The Help is about Skeeter, a young white woman in the early 1960s in Mississippi, who becomes interested in the plight of African American maids that every white family has working for them. Skeeter, with the help of Aibileen and Minny, writes about mistreatment, abuse and heartbreaks of black maids working in white families’ homes, all just before the Civil Rights revolution.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women–mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends–view one another.

A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

I’m only on my third disc (out of 14) but I can’t recommend it highly enough. Newcomers should definitely give Kathryn Stockett’s The Help a try if they want to get a great audiobook experience. I took my sister’s recommendation and now (wouldn’t ya just know it) I’m hooked on audiobooks.

To learn more about the author or for more information about her work, visit KathrynStockett.com.

To buy an audiobook copy of The Help, visit Audible.com.

I was on a deadline for reading this novel because out of the seven books I checked out from the library last month, this was the only one that I couldn’t renew because there was a long list of people wanting to get their hands on it. So I had three days to read it and get it back to the library — talk about stressful! Surprisingly, I finished the book on the day it was due. It was such a great read, I couldn’t put it down!

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is a love story, told in flashback by Jacob Jankowski, a 90-something-year-old that is now in a retirement home. He recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression.

When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures[...] He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show’s star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena’s husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for.

Gruen spent a lot of time researching about the circus life during the Great Depression before writing her novel, even using some of her own real life experiences she uncovered during her research. As a result, Gruen skillfully humanized all the memorable characters who populate her book.

To learn more about the author or for more information about her work, visit SaraGruen.com.