February Books of the Month

March 20, 2020 by Christina

February feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? I know it was a busy month for me because my calendar is packed with book club meetings, dinner plans with friends, and an introduction to quilting class on Sundays. Yet, from the vantage point of mid-March, it feels unimaginably footloose and fancy free. What did I do when I could go and do whatever I wanted? Well, what I did was read an astonishing 17 books during this month thanks in […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Amish, Animals, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Book Club, Canada, Caribbean, Classics, Classics Club, Crime, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Juvenile, LGBTQA+, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Religion, Travel, United Kingdom, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: A. J. Finn, Adam Darlin, Audre Lorde, Becky Ohlsen, Brendan Sainsbury, Catherine Bodry, Chris Chalk, Christopher Ketcham, Coco Morante, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward, Jia Tolentino, John Lee, Jon Krakauer, Kamila Shamsie, Kevin Harrison Jr, L. M. Montgomery, Linda Castillo, Marghanita Laski, Richard Thomas, Rutina Wesley, Shelly Frasier, Steven Higashide, Susan O'Malley, Sy Montgomery

January Books of the Month

February 7, 2020 by Christina

Whenever I am in Montana, I tend to go dark across social media, focusing on spending time with family and being outdoors over writing blog posts, responding to emails, or posting to Instagram. (I deleted Facebook in August 2019 followed by Twitter the next month.) I planned to return to blogging once my vacation ended. Then, work threw my team and I through another re-organization, and I was too mentally scrambled to organize my bookish thoughts in coherent ones. I’m really […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Canada, Cartography, Chunkster, Classics, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Germany, Iceland, Icelandic, Indigenious Peoples, Japanese, Mexico, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Reread, South America, Translated, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Andrew Cauthery, Anna Funder, Björg Árnadóttir, C.J. Box, Cathy O'Neil, Charles C. Mann, Guðmundur Andri Thorsson, Kaoru Mori, L. M. Montgomery, Monica Dickens, Naomi Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

December 2, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Kelsey Grammer. Apple, 2018. Originally published 1985. 4 hours, 7 minutes. Free download. Identified by the narrator as simply “The Time Traveler”, a Victorian English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surry is invited to a weekly dinner party to share about his latest invention. At this particular dinner party, the narrator recounts the Traveler’s revelation that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time. Encouraged by the audience’s response, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Dystopia, Europe, Fiction, Science Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: H.G. Wells

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

October 4, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Barrett Whitener. Blackstone Audio, 1997. Originally published 1980. 13 hours, 32 minutes. Library copy.  My public library’s catalog record for this novel describes Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character of Toole’s Pulitzer-winning novel, as “an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths”. I first encountered Toole’s novel when Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company presented […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Barrett Whitener, John Kennedy Toole

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

September 25, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by George Guidall. Simon & Schuster, 2012. 20 hours, 3 minutes. Purchased.  On a cold March night in 1896, New York Times crime reporter John Schulyer Moore is summed to the East River of New York City by his friend, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. As a psychologist – or, “alienist”, as the profession was then known – Kriezler has been brought in by the newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in examine the mutilated body and help […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Chunkster, Crime, Fiction, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Caleb Carr, George Guidall

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

September 6, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Grover Gardner. Blackstone Audio, 2011. Originally published 1906. 13 hours, 17 minutes. Purchased. Immigrating from Lithuanian to Chicago, Jergis Rudkus is eager to live out his own American dream with his wife, Ona, and her stepmother and stepsiblings. Jergis takes a job at Brown’s slaughterhouse in Chicago, expecting to make enough to support his wife and their extended family. But the family, including the children, are all sent out to find work as the family […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, AP Literature, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Food, North America, United States • Tags: Upton Sinclair

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

August 23, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Zainab Jah. Books on Tape, 2017. Originally published 2006. 18 hours, 10 minutes. Purchased.  Set in the 1960s, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel focused on the impassioned struggle of the largely Igbo population to establish the independent republic, Biafra, in southeastern Nigeria. In the early 1960s, readers are introduced to fraternal twins, Olanna and Kainene, and the men whom they become irrevocably tied to during the later portion of the 1960s. There is Odenigbo, a black […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Fiction, Nigeria, ReadDiverse, Women's Prize • Tags: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zainab Jah

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

August 9, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by Derek Perkins. Random House Audio, 2018. 11 hours, 41 minutes. Library copy. Based on the title, I assumed this book would provide 21 ways of how homo sapienswill need to adapt to life in the twenty-first century, as envisioned in Harari’s Homo Deus. Instead, Harari builds from one chapter to the next to explain how the current stories we collectively tell ourselves to orient our outlook and provide social cohesion are no longer accepted by […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Derek Perkins, Yuval Noah Harari

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

July 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Neil Shah. Audible, 2015. Originally published 2014. 13 hours, 18 minutes. Purchased. In 1527, the Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port city of Sanlúcar de Barramedawith 450 troops, officers, and slaves and another 150 sailors, wives, and servants to the newly discovered island of La Florida (present-day Florida, which is obviously not an island). His goal was to claim La Florida for the Spanish crown and find Apalacha, a city rumored to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Africa, Audiobook, Europe, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Laila Lalami

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

July 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Adjoa Andoh. Recorded Books, 2014. Originally published 2013. 17 hours, 29 minutes. Purchased. Fifteen years after leaving Nigeria to study in America, Ifemelu has decided to return home to Lagos. Everyone – her parents, her friends, even her hair braider in Trenton, New Jersey – think she is crazy to return after securing the necessary immigration papers to live in the United States indefinitely. Yet, Ifemelu has grown tired of navigating the fault lines within […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Africa, Audiobook, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Nigeria, North America, ReadDiverse, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Adjoa Andoh, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Soul of America by Jon Meacham

July 5, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by Jon Meacham and Fred Sanders. Random House Audio, 2018. 10 hours, 56 minutes. Library copy. Subtitled “The Battle for Our Better Angels”, Meacham’s book draws on history to document how times of great trouble in America (i.e. racist policies, disenfranchisement of voters, marginalization of women and people of color) have occurred simultaneously with great progress. With Americans ultimately finding the “better angels of our nature”, as Lincoln stated in his first inaugural address, despite the […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, North America, United States • Tags: Fred Sanders, Jon Meacham

Niccolò Rising by Dorothy Dunnett

June 24, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Read by Gordon Griffin. Whole Story Audiobooks, 2013. Originally published 1986. 26 hours, 16 minutes. Purchased. Set in Bruges in 1460, the first book in Dunnett’s eight-partThe House of Niccolòseries introduces readers to Claes, a teenaged dyer’s apprentice who was raised from the age of ten by his employer, Marian de Charetty. Claes believes himself to be the legitimate son of Simon de St. Pol of Kilmirren, a Scottish lord who claims Claes (or, Nicholas van der […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Audiobook, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Italy • Tags: Dorothy Dunnett, Gordon Griffin