Reading Challenge/Goals for 2023--2024 link added

[bobbiwoz]

24/75
Murder in an Irish Village by Charlene O’Connor

I wanted a light read after the Overground Railroad. This was it. A light Irish mystery. 3.5/5


Here it was 35° when I woke and not going higher than mid 40s. Happy to know it’s Spring!

 

[evilmommie]

7/24 - Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Solid 4/5 stars. ️ ️️
A story about the Riva family : the beginning, the middle, and the biggest party Malibu has ever seen. Great descriptions of each character and the turmoil some of the family goes through at times. I found this to be very entertaining. I also enjoyed Daisy and the Six by the same author, although the books were formatted differently.

8/24 - The Villa by Rachel Hawkins
3 out of 5 ️️️
Definitely entertaining. Three stories within one story. All based upon activities at an Italian villa during summer visits. Two are “real”, one is fiction. All involve murders. This book defines “frenemy”.

 

[Lumpy1106]

#16 Eaglesworth by T. R. Pearson 3 stars. A weird story, several old men sit around a town bar gossiping like townies do, discussing an odd mystery up at the old town mansion called Eaglesworth. Readable but forgettable.

# 17 A Short History of a Small Place by T. R. Pearson - ZERO STARS... and here comes a rant, so feel free to skip over it:

Apparently the first book by T. R. Pearson. Awful. A very rare Did Not Finish. Stopped at 34%. Utterly baffled at so many rave reviews. How did this get published?? This book is a never ending blathering ramble chock full of nothing. At one point this thought came to bubbling up: "Whoever wrote this must be out of their mind."

You know what reading this book is like? It's like when you're sitting around with a friend and they start telling you some long rambling third-or fifth-hand story about a cousin of their friend's husband's aunt. A long and boring story that they think is HI-larious. Your eyes immediately glaze over. You go "Uh-huh, hm, oh wow" but really you're calculating how soon you can cut them off without being totally rude. Honest to god.

It's set in a small town in the south. Narrator is... a kid? Setting is... what year? Who knows, and who cares. The narrator is telling tales he's heard from his dad about all the "wacky" townies. No actual plot. Just a long string of near stream-of-consciousness blathering. Each sentence must run 50 words on average. I made it through about 4 suicides (some wacky, some not), 4 or 5 people going insane (some wacky, some not), a child death, a choking death, multiple "wacky" drunks, a (wacky/tragic) spinster with her pet monkey... all the way up to some blathering tale about a legal dispute between a guy and his plumber over an unrepaired toilet seat. The guy previously dated 2 sisters - the Bald One and the Fat One (not particularly funny). He married the Bald One. I am not making this up. At this point, I finally went "Joke's on me", returned to my Kindle home screen and bought an actual book.

This is the 4th book I've read by T. R. Pearson. It may be the last. I read as follows:
Devil Up. Loved it.
Joy to the Just. Good.
Eaglesworth. Okay.
A Short History of a Small Place. Total crap. I can't believe it got published. **Edited to add - I just looked it up. This book was self-published in 1985. Penguin picked it up and did a reprint in paperback in 2003. I also found out that T. R. Pearson got the endorsement from John Grisham because he worked with Grisham on the screenplay of The Rainmaker.

I felt the same way about "Infinite Jest". Yeah, Infinitely long and boring more like. Somehow it has a cult following of those with just little enough going on in their live to actually finish reading the tome. Count me out of that club.

 

[willowsnn3]

#14/50 Vacationland by Meg Mitchell Moore
This one has been reviewed here before so I will just say I really enjoyed it also.
#15/50 Vacationland by Sarah Stonich
On a lake in northernmost Minnesota, you might find Naledi Lodge—only two cabins still standing, its pathways now trodden mostly by memories. And there you might meet Meg, or the ghost of the girl she was, growing up under her grandfather’s care in a world apart and a lifetime ago. Now an artist, Meg paints images “reflected across the mirrors of memory and water,” much as the linked stories of Vacationland cast shimmering spells across distance and time.
Those whose paths have crossed at Naledi inhabit Vacationland: a man from nearby Hatchet Inlet who knew Meg back when, a Sarajevo refugee sponsored by two parishes who can’t afford “their own refugee,” aged sisters traveling to fulfill a fateful pact once made at the resort, a philandering ad man, a lonely Ojibwe stonemason, and a haiku-spouting girl rescued from a bog.
Vacationland is a moving portrait of a place—at once timeless and of the moment, composed of conflicting dreams and shared experience—and of the woman bound to it by legacy and sometimes longing, but not necessarily by choice.
Sooo, when I first went to my library's website to search for Vacationland, both these showed up. So I thought it would be fun to try both. Both were very good but I think I enjoyed the second one better.

 

[mrs. magoo]

10/30 - Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist - 2.5 out 5 stars for me

From GoodReads:
Cold-blooded murder heats up Agatha's summer holiday! Agatha travels to Cyprus, only to contend with her estranged fiance, an egregious group of truly terrible tourists, and a string of murders...In this sixth entertaining outing Agatha leaves the sleepy Cotswold village of Carsely to pursue love - and finds a murderer. Spurned at the altar, she follows her fleeing fiance James Lacey to Cyprus, where, instead of enjoying the honeymoon they'd planned, they witness the killing of an obnoxious tourist in a disco. Intrigue and a string of murders surround the unlikely couple, in a plot as scorching as the Cypriot sun!

This is my 3rd Agatha Raisin book and I love her but I feel like she was portrayed as a quivering mess of a female in this one. She was too worried about James and pleasing him to stand up for herself. I know that I am late to this series but I enjoy listening to them on my walk.

Just started The Orphan Collector this morning. I am close to finishing my in paper book for the month as well.

Thank you to everyone who takes the time to post on here. I love all the suggestions.

 

[luvmarypoppins]

24/75
Murder in an Irish Village by Charlene O’Connor

I wanted a light read after the Overground Railroad. This was it. A light Irish mystery. 3.5/5


Here it was 35° when I woke and not going higher than mid 40s. Happy to know it’s Spring!

Yeah. Another cozy lover! I have a few autographed ones I need to get to. I’ve talked to a few authors online. Krista Davis and Tonya Kappes.

 

[willowsnn3]

#16/50 Almost Gone by John & Mackenzie Baldwin
Based on a true story of a young christian girl from Texas who meets in an online chat room, a charming young Muslim man who claims to live in New York but actually lives in Kosovo. Over the course of a few months, Mackenzie is visiting a local mosque & is studying to convert to muslim while making plans to secretly travel to Kosovo where she thinks she will marry Aadam.
This was pretty good & interesting.

 

[RangerPooh]

5/30 - A Superior Death by Nevada Barr

Description:
"Park ranger Anna Pigeon returns, in a mystery that unfolds in and around Lake Superior, in whose chilling depths sunken treasure comes with a deadly price. In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels. Leaving behind memories of the Texas high desert and the environmental scam she helped uncover, Anna is adjusting to the cool damp of Lake Superior and the spirits and lore of the northern Midwest. But when a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. Written with a naturalist's feel for the wilderness and a keen understanding of characters who thrive in extreme conditions, A Superior Death is a passionate, atmospheric page-turner."

This is the 2nd book in the Anna Pigeon series. I liked it a lot. I have especially liked the descriptions of the National Parks and the wilderness in the first 2 books of the series. I look forward to continuing the series.

I love Nevada Barr! I began reading her series back in the late 90s when I was working as a fire lookout. My favorite is Fire Storm. I've reread the series multiple times!

When you finish with the series you might also consider the following:

• Pamela Beason- There's 5 or 6 books in the Sam Weston series. I read the series last year and really liked it. The main character is a female who works in wildlife management, often as a free lance writer. Mysterious death follows her.
• Jeanne Meeks- Backcountry Mysteries. There's two books in this series, and I wish there was more.
• Kathleen Concannon- A Deadly Bluff. Another park ranger mystery. It is only one book, hopefully the writer will pick up the series and write more. It seemed like it was to be a series.
• Scott Graham- I read the first in his series, but found it hard to get into. I might give it another shot.
• Jessica Speart- I've tried to get into her series, but was unable to. I need to try again.

 

[RangerPooh]

6/12 Ghosts and Goblins and Murder (Fiona Fleming Cozy Mysteries Book 4) by Patti Larsen.

7/12 Ganache and Fondant and Murder (Fiona Fleming Cozy Mysteries Book 5) by Patti Larsen.

 

[MGMmjl]

6/30 - The Last Mile by David Baldacci

Description:
"Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution--for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier--when he's granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime.

Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars's case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men's families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth.

The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars--guilty or not--a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now?

But when a member of Decker's team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger--and more sinister--than just one convicted criminal's life hangs in the balance. Decker will need all of his extraordinary brainpower to stop an innocent man from being executed."

I read the first book in the Amos Decker series, Memory Man, a while back, and decided to read the 2nd one when I saw it was available online from my library. It was another good one! I look forward to reading the next in the series at some point. I am jumping around between a few different series currently.

 

[bobbiwoz]

25/75 “Wearing the letter P” by Sophie Hodorowicz Knab. The book‘s dedication says it all.

“Dedicated to my mother, Józefa Zalewska Hodorowicz, Forced Laborer, Rheinmetall Borsig, Unterluss, Germany, 1943-1945 and to all the women of Poland who suffered and died as forced laborers during WW II. May their experiences survive and be remembered.”

It was a difficult read. In a few WW II fiction books there were references to what it was like to be a Pole in occupied Poland but they failed to tell the true horror of what it was like to belong to a race of people the Germans declared to be Untermensch “subhuman “ in the Nazi’s elaborate racial classification system. The full extent of the discrimination was felt by the Poles who were slave laborers in Germany. In August 1944 there were 1.7 civilian Poles thus classified in Germany, men and women.

I can’t rate the book as “good” or “bad.” It’s important that it was written.

 

[OKW8297]

3. The Death of Race byBrian Bantum. This is the book for my Lenten study this year. Excellent and thought provoking.

 

[Simba's Mom]

#12/56-The Nurse's Secret, Amanda Skenandore, 4 stars. A very interesting read, told in the way of a fictional account of a young pick-pocket, who snuck her way into a nurse's training program, in the beginning of a new concept of training nurses. This "new" (at that time) training program had been initiated by Florence Nightingale. For anyone interested in nursing, especially, I'd highly recommend it.

 

[willowsnn3]

6/30 - The Last Mile by David Baldacci

Description:
"Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution--for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier--when he's granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime.

Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars's case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men's families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth.

The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars--guilty or not--a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now?

But when a member of Decker's team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger--and more sinister--than just one convicted criminal's life hangs in the balance. Decker will need all of his extraordinary brainpower to stop an innocent man from being executed."

I read the first book in the Amos Decker series, Memory Man, a while back, and decided to read the 2nd one when I saw it was available online from my library. It was another good one! I look forward to reading the next in the series at some point. I am jumping around between a few different series currently.

I love the Amos Decker/Memory Man series!

 

[sdk1231]

18. The Comanche Kid by James Robert Daniels - story about a 16 year old girl who sets out to avenge the death of her family members and attempt to get back her little sister who was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. A pretty rousing Western tale. I read some reviews comparing it to True Grit and Lonesome Dove. I wouldn't put it in the same league, but it was a good read.

19. Jane Fury (The Comanche Kid Book 2) by James Robert Daniels - continued adventures of the heroine from Book 1, but now she's all grown up. Just okay.

 

[willowsnn3]

#17/50 The Thing In The Snow by Sean Adams
Not for me. Very slow paced & never ever found out what was up with the thing in the snow.
Complete waste of time for me ( my own fault for finishing it)

 

[mrs. magoo]

11/30 - The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
Picked up this book from a little free library and greatly enjoyed it. It had me hooked from the beginning. I would give it 4 stars out of 5.

From Good Reads:
The House at Riverton is a gorgeous debut novel set in England between the wars. Perfect for fans of "Downton Abbey," it's the story of an aristocratic family, a house, a mysterious death, and a way of life that vanished forever, told in flashback by a woman who witnessed it all.

The novel is full of secrets - some revealed, others hidden forever, reminiscent of the romantic suspense of Daphne du Maurier. It's also a meditation on memory and the devastation of war and a beautifully rendered window into a fascinating time in history.

 

[Simba's Mom]

#13/56
"Forever, Erma" by Erma Bombeck. A compilation of some of her best articles about family life and raising children. #3 1/2 stars.

 

[bobbiwoz]

26/75 The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand, an interesting book about the remaking of a hotel where a ghost, Grace, lives. I enjoyed it, 4/5.

 

[tiggrbaby]

March:

#12/40: Switchboard Soldiers by Jennifer Chiaverini (4/5) (historical fiction)

When the US entered WWI, they discovered that they were in desperate need of telephone operators who could not only speak fluent English and French, but were able to do it quickly under harrowing circumstances and be discreet. The US Army Signal Corps began recruiting female telephone operators, even though they were unable to enlist or vote. Thousands of women applied. Those chosen were deployed throughout France.

#13/40: The Soul of an Octopus: a Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery (4.5/5) (nonfiction)

Scientists are now observing octopuses solving problems and are trying to determine the meaning behind their color changing techniques. This naturalist details her experiences with ones in the New England Aquarium and in the wild.

If you enjoyed Remarkably Bright Creatures, then this book is a must read!

#14/40: Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (4/5) (fiction)

In the 1970s the rock group The Six was just beginning to attract national attention. Then the talented and beautiful Daisy Jones joined and their career took off. But tensions between the lead singer, Daisy, and other members of the band lead to their break up.

Told in the form of interviews years later.

Now an Amazon Prime show.

#15/40: I Will Find You by Harlan Coben (3.5/5) (suspense)

David Burroughs is in prison for the murder of his three year old son, but he does not recall the incident. Five years later, his former sister-in-law Rachel visits the prison with a photograph. In the background, there is a boy that they both believe to be his son. David plans an escape to find the truth, but will he be able to do it with the FBI on his trail?