Professor Gary Fuller sets out to fill in the gaps in your geography knowledge. I would guess that I know a little more geography than the average American but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still woefully lacking. I downloaded this book on a nook Free Friday (I believe), thinking that I might […]
I hesitated over this book for a long time. I’d somewhere picked up the idea that it involves a lot of Philosophy, which I read as Big, Boring Thoughts That Have No Practical Application to Anyone’s Life. Is that bad? Probably. But I came across it in Will Schwalbe’s memoir, The End of Your Life Book Club and it piqued my…
In the Five Hundred Kingdoms, a force called the Tradition tries to fit likely young men and women down the well-trod paths of fairy tale characters. Now it’s trying to work its magic on Princess Rosamund but Godmother Lily is doing her best to thwart it. The Queen has just died and Lily sees the […]
Author Meera Lee Sethi travels to Sweden one summer to volunteer at a bird observatory. Her time in the mists and mountains of Sweden led her to write a collection of contemplative essays that are collected here. What beautiful language! I was in deep like from the beginning and in love by the closing sentences […]
A group of comrades-in-arms have almost all gone back to live in the rural area where they came from. Some are faring better than others but they all seem to be at a loss as to what to do with themselves now that the war is over. Things change when their long-time leader, Kunessin, finally […]
Synopsis from GoodReads: In 1887, a young Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet, creating an international icon in the quick-witted sleuth Sherlock Holmes. In this very first Holmes mystery, the detective introduces himself to Dr. John H. Watson with the puzzling line “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and so begins Watson’s, […]
The Bliss family has a secret. A lot of bakeries say that their pastries are like magic but their pastries really are magic. Oldest daughter Rose loves helping out in the kitchen but she hasn’t been allowed to do much more than fetch ingredients and she’s never been entrusted with any magical recipes. But when […]
Scarlett O’Brien dreams that her life will one day become just like a romantic comedy. Her friends and family worry about her because she seems to be dissatisfied with the life she has because of her obsession with the movies. She’s engaged to be married in a couple of months but she just doesn’t seem […]
Louie Zamperini was a little bit of a punk as a young teen, staying in trouble all the time. But then he discovered running and pretty much turned his life around. People were taking notice of his times and the Olympics were in his future. He made it to the Berlin Olympics in a distance […]
Author Kenneth C. Davis sets out to fill in the gaps of the average reader’s knowledge of mythology. Don’t expect a book of stories about Zeus and Hera; they’re here but so are gods from Egypt, Celtic lands, Africa, the Americas, Asia, India, and just about every culture you can think of. This was not […]
The seventh son of the seventh son, aptly named Septimus Heap, is stolen the night he is born by a midwife who pronounces him dead. That same night, the baby’s father, Silas Heap, comes across a bundle in the snow containing a new born girl with violet eyes. The Heaps take this helpless newborn into […]