I’m 42 as I write this so it’s been 30 – 35 years since I read any of Beverly Cleary’s books. I always enjoyed them as a child, and can clearly picture exactly where they were on my local library’s shelves. I called it a good library day when I found a new one. Who am I kidding? Every library visit was a good library day, but…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt at That Artsy Reader Girl is Books On My Fall 2020 TBR. I’m not that organized; I just read whatever looks good when it’s time to choose a new one. So I decided to list the Top Ten Books I Read in Elementary School. Beverly Cleary has been on […]
Welcome to my weekly update for September 20, 2020! We finally got rain in Portland on Friday! Woohoo! Air quality has improved a lot. We’ve still got an air quality warning in place as I write this but our numbers on the Weather Channel app have dropped from 535 on Tuesday (I think that was the day I took the screenshot) to 32 […]
I wanted to like this. The concept is strong and I couldn’t help comparing it to The Night Circus, another book I wanted to love. But there was way too much description, infinitely too many unanswered questions, and too little actual plot to please me. This is author Janella Angeles’s debut novel and unfortunately, it shows. She…
Some of the first books I clearly remember loving as a child were the Ramona Quimby books. Who doesn’t love that irrepressible little girl? It’s been literally decades since I read them so I don’t remember many details from the stories at all, but I still think of Ramona and company with fondness. My husband […]
5 Stars. First of all, I loved listening to this audiobook. Each part has a different narrator and they each do a fabulous job. What I really loved were the musical numbers by Corky Siegel. If Mike was playing “America the Beautiful” in the text, a harmonica would play the song softly in the background, for example. That kind of thing is […]
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday is a fun one: “Cover Freebie (choose your own topic, centered on book covers or cover art).” I decided to list the top 10 book covers on my Overdrive wish list. In alphabetical order: Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly–The art deco font and flourishes really catch my eye in this […]
Welcome to my weekly update for September 13, 2020! I don’t have any hiking pictures to share this week. We stayed in and away from potential crowds the whole Labor Day weekend. A freak windstorm blew through Oregon on Tuesday, keeping us in again. My husband worked the rest of the week. Huge wildfires ignited […]
I freely admit that I find Dan Brown to be a mediocre writer at best, BUT I am willing to overlook that because he grabs my attention with some new ideas and I can’t put his books down until I see where he’s going. I just couldn’t get into this particular book as much as I usually do. I noted at 22% on my Kindle that I didn’t…
I literally just finished this graphic novel and I’m about to flip back to page one and read it again. That isn’t to say it was perfect–it wasn’t–but I know that in my hurry to read it, I missed a lot of important details. Now that I know Anna Kharkova’s story, I can take my time and chew it over. I’m struggling with where to…
I’m obviously not the only bibliophile who reads a book and thinks, “Wow! I wish I’d read this when I was younger.” I know that I would have appreciated some books even more as a younger reader. I know that other books that speak to me now would have spoken even louder back then and maybe clarified some decisions and smoothed […]