Review of 2019

Another year has ended.  It's been a good year of reading for me.  I read many, many good books!  I read 60 books, with 5 of those being non-fiction.  As I count down to my top book read in 2019, first I will list the books that I read that I rated as either very good, great, or excellent:

The Clock Dance-AnneTyler

sweet water-Christina Baker Kline

The Girls-Lori Lanson?: great

Where The Crawdads Sing-Delia Owens

Ginny Moon-Benjamin Ludwig

The Glass Room-Simon Mawer

The Cloister-James Carroll

Varina-Charles Frazier

The Golden Hour-t. greenwood

Cemetery Road-Greg Iles

The Thornbirds-Colleen McCullough

Idaho-Emily Ruskovich

Breaking Water-t. greenwood

Bodies of Water-t.greenwood

The Story of Forgetting-Stefan Merrill Block

The Clockmaker’s Daughter-Kate Morton

Before We Were Yours-Lisa Wingate

The Nickel Boys-Colson Whitehead

The Historian-Elizabeth Kostova

This Tender Land-William Kent Krueger

The World That We Knew-Ann Hoffman

Olive, Again-Elizabeth Strout

The Testaments-Margaret Atwood

The Boys in the Boat-Daniel James Brown

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse-Charles Mackesy

So, 25 out of 60 were very highly rated by me.

Here's my top 10:

The Clock Dance-AnneTyler

Where The Crawdads Sing-Delia Owens

The Cloister-James Carroll

Varina-Charles Frazier

Idaho-Emily Ruskovich

The Story of Forgetting-Stefan Merrill Block

The Clockmaker’s Daughter-Kate Morton

The World That We Knew-Ann Hoffman

Olive, Again-Elizabeth Strout

The Testaments-Margaret Atwood

And now, my top 5:

The Cloister-James Carroll

Varina-Charles Frazier

The Story of Forgetting-Stefan Merrill Block

Olive, Again-Elizabeth Strout

The Testaments-Margaret Atwood

My top 3 are easy:

The Story of Forgetting-Stefan Merrill Block

Olive, Again-Elizabeth Strout

The Testaments-Margaret Atwood

Now, the going gets really tough. I loved these 3 books. It's very hard to choose. But, oddly enough, for my top favorite book of the year I am going to choose:

The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block. It is a book that I cannot get out of my mind. It was published in 2009, ten years ago! I have read it twice and still want to read it again. Powerful book!

My goal for 2020? I think that I want to be able to read 60 books again! Or more. So off I go to read!

2 more for December

I read The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charles Mackesy shortly before Christmas, and loved it so much that I gave it for gifts! It's a short, easy to read book with incredibly beautiful illustrations.  The narrative reminded me of Winnie the Pooh and his friends, passing on simple, important lessons.

Today I finished Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and The Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep.  It has taken me forever to complete reading this, primarily because I didn't feel any interest in the book.  First of all, Harper Lee was not on trial.  According to this book, Harper Lee intended to write a book titled The Reverend about the true case of murder and fraud committed by a Reverend Maxwell.  She did a great deal of research on the case, but never published anything related to it. It took the author 276 pages to tell that story.  The author did talk to a number of people who interacted with Ms. Lee and that part was interesting to me.  But all in all, I was quite disappointed with this book. 

December reading

I read two books in December.  That doesn't seem like much for me.  I guess that I was busier than I thought!  Plus both books were ones that had to be read quite purposely/slowly.

The first book I read in December was The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.  Yes, I know, I was slow to come to this book.  First of all, it is non-fiction and secondly, it is about rowing.  Neither of which I really care about.  However, thanks to one of my book groups, this book was chosen!  I found the story to be a very interesting one.  It is about the Rowing team from the University of Washington who made it to the Olympics in Germany in 1936. It is based on the life of Joe Rantz, one of the nine rowers.  The loyalty, compassion, and trust the team had in each other led them to the Olympics.  I wish that the book had covered more of when they were actually in Germany, rather than (what seemed to me) the focus on the day-to-day rowing events.  It is truly an inspiring story of what these working-class guys in the Depression were able to do with their lives.

The second book I read in December was Inland by T'ea Obreht.  I initially had some difficulty figuring out the story, but it was good enough to persevere and I caught on and read on! The book is really two stories that intertwine together over one day. 



One morning, in the Arizona Territories in 1893, Nora's youngest son Toby (age seven) came running from the creek to tell her that he saw tracks of "the beast".  The family had concerns about Toby's obsession about this beast that he would report seeing.  meanwhile, Nora's husband and two older sons had left the homestead.  Her husband Emmett had left sometime before to find water and as time went by, the two older sons left to try to find their father.

Meanwhile, one of the survivors of the Camel Corps was telling his story of how he had gotten involved with camels and how the Camel Corp had been organized to help clear the West of Indians. This is based on an actual true story! Because the camels could survive so long without water, it was determined that they would be much more useful than horses or mules as the military headed further west.

There are a host of characters who play notably in the stories.  There is a bit of mysticism in the stories.  It is hard to describe all that went on! This is a book that I will return to read again.

Catching Up Again

I finished four books in November and didn't get around to blogging, so I'm doing them all here.  In my defense, November was a very busy month for me!

1) Chances Are by Richard Russo.  I had never read anything by Mr. Russo and I really enjoyed this book.  It was a book club choice and I'm glad it was!  It is about three college friends who meet up on Martha's Vineyard forty-four years after graduating from the same college.  In 1971, the three men were at the same place on Martha's Vineyard with their friend Jacy.  Jacy disappeared that weekend and no one had ever heard from her since then.  Each of the boys had been in love with Jacy while in college.  So on this weekend in 2015, three very different men got together and shared where their lives had taken them, and, again, discussed what could have happened to Jacy.  It's a good mystery with a satisfying ending.

2) The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston.  I picked this up because reading the summary on the back made me think of the Outlander series.  And that this book is the first of a series.  Xanthe was a young woman who decided to move from London with her recently divorced mother to a small town in England.  Her mother was an antique collector and wanted to open a shop in the town (Marlborough) that they moved to.  Xanthe had a gift of touching some antiques and sensing their past stories.  When she becomes enchanted with a silver chatelaine ("a decorative belt hook or clasp worn at the waist with a series of chains suspended from it"...if you want to know more, google it!). Predictably, Xanthe is went back to the 1600's while she was examining the chatelaine.  An, of course, there is a love interest that develops while she is there.  It was a sweet story, but I doubt that I will go on with it.

3) Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse.  This was another book on sale at Barnes and Noble for $5.  I knew that it was a Young Adult book, but was intrigued with the description of the story so I got the book.  The book takes place in Amsterdam in 1943.  Hanneke, a young Jewish girl, finds and buys blackmarket goods that her clients request.  One day, a client asked her help to find a young Jewish girl that she had taken in, but had vanished. Hanneke does her research and begins the search for the girl in the blue coat.  The story was well-written and, obviously, easy to read.  I'm glad that I read it.

4) And last, but not least, I spent my Thanksgiving in Mexico finishing the last of the Outlander series-Written in my Own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon.  I started this book last March and just had trouble finishing it.  It is a really good read, and I finally figured out that I didn't want it to end!  But I finished it and it had a great ending!  I understand that volume nine is being written and I already can't wait to read it!

The Testaments

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale.  The book is great.  It, too, will probably be in my top three for 2019 (along with Olive, Again). 

The Testaments takes place fifteen years after The Handmaid's Tale.  The story is told in chapters that vary from being written by Aunt Lydia and testaments written by two women, one from Gilead and one from Canada. Aunt Lydia's chapters tell the story of her life and her accumulation of power in Gilead.  (You will be surprised to hear of her life before Gilead!)

The book is almost like a spy novel in that someone was a mole in Gilead. And the order in Gilead began breaking apart.

It's a rather big book, but I read it in just over two days.  It's that fascinating!  I would certainly recommend that one read the Handmaid's Tale first (it's a great read, too).

Olive, Again

Let me just say this right now....this book will be in my top three for the year 2019!  Do you remember Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout?  Well, Olive is back again, older, wiser and still a bit cranky.

Olive, Again is told the same way that the first book was written-as short stories featuring Olive's life in her 80's.  She goes through her time getting involved, whether she likes it or not, with other people in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

It's a great book that really touches on love and aging. I don't want to tell anything more about the book, other than it is beautifully written and one that I carried in my thoughts for days.

Read it.

Two okay books

These two books below are ones that I read in October.  One I liked, the other I didn't.

1) A Life Without Water by Marci Bolden.  This was a book group choice and has had mixed responses from the members.  Carol and John had divorced twenty years ago, after Carol fled town.  She moved away and began a new life.

One day John unexpectedly showed up at Carol's office wanting to see their daughter for her thirtieth birthday.  Turned out that John was dying and had both amends and promises that he wanted to work on, and Carol was a central part of what he needed to do.  Against her better judgment, she and John took off on a journey long overdue.

I found some of the story rather unbelievable and thought that the writing was more of a young adult style.  It's not a book I will be keeping.

2) The Child by Fiona Barton.  This book was better than the one above, but not good enough for me to keep.  It is a mystery that kept me interested.

The author brought back her character journalist Kate Waters in the story.  Kate came across a short blurb in a newspaper that was about a construction site where bones of a baby were discovered.  The short piece caught Kate's attention and she began to investigate the story.  It eventually led her to two other women one of whom had had a baby kidnapped from the hospital right after birth.  Kate had to search out people that had lived at a certain housing area in the 1980's to begin to piece the whole story together.  It's quite a good mystery!