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

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

September 11, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 474 pgs. Purchased.  Marie’s father committed suicide in Hong Kong in the days after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre — duel sins referred to only in hushed tones. Ten-year-old Marie is unsure how she is supposed to grieve for the father than abandoned her and her mother back in Vancouver months before the protests were brutally ended. And her distance from mainland China leaves her unsure as to why her father […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Awards and Prizes, Canada, China, Chunkster, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America, ReadDiverse, Women's Prize • Tags: Madeleine Thien

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

The Power by Naomi Alderman

April 26, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Originally published 2016. 387 pgs. Purchased. Teenage girls across the globe now hold a tremendous amount of power – electric currents flowing through their bodies can be harnessed to hurt, maim, and even kill. As these young women learn how to harness and transfer their powers, they topple male-dominated power structures around the globe, including the Saudi Arabian government, the United States military, and the religious authority of the Pope. The collapse […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Women's Prize • Tags: Naomi Alderman

Normal People by Sally Rooney

April 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Hogarth, 2019. Originally published 2018. 273 pgs. Purchased. In addition to winning the 2018 Costa Book Award for Novel, Rooney’s novel was also longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see it offered as one of the options for April from Book of the Month, a monthly book subscription service that I’ve been part of for the last six months. So thrilled, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, Ireland, Women's Prize • Tags: Sally Rooney

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

October 7, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Harper, 2009. 508 pgs. Purchased. Young Harrison Shepherd is taken to Mexico by his mother in the late 1920s as she follows her heart — and her goal of marrying a more interesting and wealthier man than Harrison’s American father. There, Harrison falls in love with writing stories and keeping a diary of his experiences of his life in Mexico, of the Depression Era riots in Washington D.C., and of working for exiled Soviet leader Lev Trotsky. […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Fiction, Mexico, North America, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

July 29, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Riverhead Books, 2010. 512 pgs. Purchased. Longlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize (now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction), Waters novel is set in the summer of 29147 when Dr. Faraday is called to attend to a patient at Hundreds Hall, a grand English estate he recollects with fond memories. His mother once worked there as a maid and, as a young boy, he was once allowed to step inside the home during a picnic for children from […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Awards and Prizes, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom, Women's Prize • Tags: Sarah Waters

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

June 13, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Algonquin Books, 2018. Print. 308 pgs. Borrowed from a friend. Celestial and Roy are a young couple in Atlanta with a marriage that can be both wonderful and rocky. Roy’s career in sales has afforded her the opportunity to chase her dream of making handmade baby dolls, and the two of them are contemplating having the child that both sets of parents long for. Their dreams are put on hold after a trip to Louisiana to visit Roy’s […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Awards and Prizes, Fiction, North America, ReadDiverse, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: Tayari Jones

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

May 27, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Anna Fields. Blackstone Audio, 2008. Originally published 2001. 11 hours, 24 minutes. Library copy.  In an unnamed country in South America, guests arrive at the Vice President’s home to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese businessman, Katsumi Hosokawa. Eager to woo the businessman and encourage him to invest in the country, the country has invited a famous American opera singer by the name of Roxane Cross to serenade Katsumi. The party is interrupted by a […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Art, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Book Club, Fiction, South America, Women's Prize • Tags: Ann Patchett, Anna Fields

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

March 28, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Noah Taylor. Simon & Schuster Audio, 2012. 10 hours, 21 minutes. Library copy. Stationed as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock off the coast of Western Australia, Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel live largely in isolation. Two miscarriages and one stillbirth have isolated the couple even further — both from their family on the mainland who are anxious for grandchildren and from each other. The arrival of a battered on the shores of Janus Rock […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Audiobook, Fiction, Oceania, Women's Prize • Tags: M. L. Stedman, Noah Taylor

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

March 5, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition.  Riverhead, 2014. 568 pgs. Purchased. In the aftermath of World War I, twenty-six year old Frances Wray and her mother are obliged to take in paying guests — a more polite term for lodgers that allows Mrs. Wray and the neighbors to ignore the family’s rather spectacular tumble in social standing. Their room for rent notice is answered by a young, married couple from the “clerk class” named Lilian and Leonard Barber, and the Wrays and Barber have […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Book Club, Chunkster, Crime, Europe, Fiction, LGBTQA+, United Kingdom, Women's Prize • Tags: Sarah Waters

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

March 10, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — print. Vintage, 2011. 758 pgs. Purchased. In 1937, Andras Lévi arrives in Paris to attend architecture college from Budapest on scholarship with a letter he promised an elderly, wealthy woman he knows through the connections of the Jewish community that he would deliver. The woman’s twenty-something son provides Andras with a place to sleep until he can find his own apartment in the city’s Latin Quarter; the woman’s thirty-something daughter, Klara, receives the letter without revealing the mysterious […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Hungary, Women's Prize • Tags: Julie Orringer