Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl invited us to share our favorite audiobook narrators this week. I'm almost always listening to an audiobook while I'm cleaning, driving, or even exercising and I'm trying (with some success) to win my husband over. It was hard to limit my list to only ten. I tried to write a bit about why I like [...]
Welcome to my weekly update for April 23, 2023! We went to The Flower Fields in Carlsbad, CA this week. I visited while my husband attended a work conference in 2018. It was so spectacular, I made him go back to experience it with me this year. It was even better than I remembered! These gardens include 55 acres of ranunculus flowers in every conceivable color. The fields are planted on a hillside, so when you climb to the top then turn and look behind you, you can see the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean beyond the flowers. It's truly a sight to behold. Slideshow: Ranunculus field There are lots of other fun displays when you enter the garden. My husband and I liked this grouping of flower pots shaped like heads with different flowers growing out of the top. A broader view of the flower fields with the Pacific on the horizon. Posted: Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti 🌟🌟🌟½ 10 of My Favorite National Parks Once upon an Eskimo Time by Edna Wilder 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Read: Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor #3) by Jessica Townsend 🌟🌟🌟🌟 The Tyrant’s Tomb (The Trials of Apollo #4) by Rick Riordan, read by Robbie Daymond 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Guests by Kealan Patrick Burke 🌟🌟🌟 Currently Reading: Soulstar by C. L. Polk Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi Up Next: I took a break from audiobooks this week to catch up on some of my favorite podcasts. I'll probably download a fairly short one soon. My sister arrives on Friday for a weeklong visit (Yay!) so I'll be getting our little space spruced up for her. I'm planning to skip my…
4 Stars. Edna Wilder shared this collection of episodes from her mother’s life as a young girl growing up in a traditional Iñupiat village on the Norton Sound. It reads very much like an oral storyteller sharing her family history, which feels like the perfect format for this biography. She also included some traditional tribal [...]
3.5 Stars. This book shares much more complex data in formats that are unfamiliar to me and probably many other casual readers. There was a lot more text to explain both the data presented and the format. I devoted as much time as I could to it, but an impending return date (today, in fact) limited me. That's why I'm rounding [...]
Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl invited us to share a non-book freebie this week. "Choose your own topic that’s not related to books!...Take this time to let your readers get to know you a little!" So I decided to list ten of my favorite national parks. Unless otherwise noted, all images © Jennifer G. at Introverted Reader 2023 Clara Belle, our faithful little home away from home For those of you who don't know, my husband and I wander around the country with his job as a traveling healthcare professional. We live in our RV while he's on assignment, which is usually three months in one location at a time. One of the factors we consider when he's applying to hospitals is proximity to national parks. We enjoy the outdoors and hiking and can never decide if we prefer the mountains or the beach. We love all 36 of the national parks we've visited. I could choose any of them as my favorites depending on my mood, but these are the ones that speak to me today. We’ve visited the national parks I’ve marked with yellow trees. Thanks to Trekkn for the original image. Great Smoky Mountains Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains Our home is near Asheville, NC, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the Smokies aren't far away. I think of this as my home park. If I were listing my favorite national park units, I would choose the Blue Ridge Parkway because it runs right through Asheville and I have spent a lot of time hiking the adjacent trails. Shenandoah National Park is actually in the Blue Ridge Mountains, like Asheville, but it's in Virginia and farther away. So the Great Smoky Mountains get my top spot. Mount Rainier Mount Rainier rises above a wildflower…
Welcome to my weekly update for April 16, 2023! We went up to Catalina Island and spent one night last weekend. It has a couple of tiny little towns but we only visited the bigger one, Avalon, named after King Arthur's Avalon in Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, Idylls of the King. It's a beautiful island, especially after all the rain California has had this year. Everything was green and blooming. There was a lot of fog and mist while we were there so I kept thinking of Marion Zimmer Bradley's book, The Mists of Avalon. On our first day, we joined a driving tour of the town area. Then we walked and explored on our own. You might notice the large, white circular building on the far side of the bay in the first picture below. It's the Catalina Casino but it's not a gambling hall. Casino used to mean "gathering place" and that's how the term is used here. It's a beautiful building and we wish we'd made time to tour the inside. The next morning we downloaded an audio tour and walked around a bit more before catching a shuttle up to the Airport in the Sky. It was a glorious, sunny day up there above the low clouds and it was legitimately hot! We were shocked! We connect elevation with cooler weather but I guess getting above the clouds and away from the cool air on the ocean makes things work differently on Catalina. We had lunch at the little airport restaurant then rode our rented bikes the ten miles back into town. Catalina has a small herd of bison, if you can believe it. They were brought over in the 1920s to film a movie--either The Vanishing American or The Thundering Herd (both based on books…
4 Stars. Rex Ogle’s mother and stepfather physically and emotionally abused him when he was a child. In his second memoir, Punching Bag, he describes unimaginable incidents that are a terrible reality for far too many children. An alcoholic stepfather who continues the cycle of abuse that he experienced as a child himself [...]
4 Stars. I find this review hard to write for some reason but I just found my notes so I’m going to basically just list my bullet point thoughts. The description of the beating death of Vincent Chin gave me nightmares. It felt too graphic (And as I write this I’m hip deep in my annual monthlong horror fest, so I’m not exactly a [...]
Welcome to my weekly update for April 9, 2023! Happy Easter, Happy Passover, or Ramadan Mubarak to those who celebrate! I've been an affiliate of Malaprop's Bookstore in my hometown of Asheville, NC for years now. I link to their website for books I haven't reviewed yet. I'm keeping that relationship because I love my bookstore but I don't think anyone has ever bought anything through one of my links. I'm not trying to make money here--I just want people to know about Malaprop's and support independent bookstores. So I hope that readers are shopping locally! But now I'm also adding in affiliate links for Bookshop.org. They support independent bookstores in a couple of different ways but they're a bigger company. I decided that if I can realistically influence even one person to buy books from Bookshop instead of Amazon, that would be a win for the little guys. So I'm starting to incorporate those links now. Last week we drove over to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. It's California's largest state park. I saw on social media that the wildflowers were in bloom there. It was beautiful and smelled heavenly. I've also been dying to visit that area for a couple of years because they have some metal sculptures that I thought looked really cool. We did that too and they were amazing! Slideshow: Sea dragon sculpture. This thing was huge! It actually crossed the road. Purple sand verbena and yellow desert sunflower. There were lots of other smaller flowers blooming too but these were the most conspicuous. Beavertail cactus blooming beside sand verbena I believe this is an Anna's hummingbird. He sat there for quite a while and let my husband get relatively close before he flew away. Posted: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss:…
4 Stars. These novellas read like engrossing episodes of your favorite science fiction TV show and I inhale them like popcorn. Murderbot is an unexpected, understated delight and its dry sense of humor keeps me smiling. Its observations of humanity are on point and hilarious. It’s teamed up with ART (short for Asshole Research [...]