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

A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett

December 23, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Project Gutenberg, 2012. Originally published 1896. 256 pgs. Free download. In 1690, the wife of Sir Jeoffry, Daphne, dies soon after giving birth to her ninth child. Her husband is disappointed with the birth of a ninth daughter and refuses contact with the baby, banishing Clorinda to the other side of the castle with her only living siblings, Anne and Barbara. Blessed with better health than either of her sisters, Clorinda grows up to be an […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Frances Hodgson Burnett

They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple

December 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Persephone Books, 2000. Originally published 1934. 496 pgs. Purchased.  The Blakes are considered to be a typical English family: Celia is a homemaker with three children – Freda, Ruth, and Douglas – while Thomas holds down a job at a Leicester engineering business and serves as the breadwinner for his wife and children, his widowed mother, his unemployed brother, and his unmarried sister. Yet, the family has long believed they could be more and have more […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple

Wife in Name Only by Charlotte M. Brame

December 6, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Project Gutenberg, 2012. Originally published 1876. 137 pgs. Free download. Comprised of thirty short chapters, Brame’s book can be roughly divided into three parts to follow the shifts in who the main character is. In Part One, a provincial doctor with a failing practice aids a titled Englishman traveling with his ill, pregnant wife. The two are traveling under an assumed name because they married without permission from the man’s father and do not want their […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Charlotte M. Brame

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

Young Master Darcy by Pamela Aidan

November 25, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Wytherngate Press, 2010. 122 pgs. Purchased. Set at Christmastime in 1797, Aidan’s novella helps to explain how Fitzwilliam Darcy would become the prideful man tormented by the unsuitability of his love for Elizabeth Bennet. Arriving home from his first term at Eton, thirteen-year-old Darcy learns his mother is dying and desires to make her last Christmas a memorable and happy one. Darcy is determined to carry out her wishes, but he is also a boy toeing […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Austen Inspired, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Pamela Aidan

Dracula by Bram Stoker

November 18, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Top Five Books, 2011. Originally published 1897. 398 pgs. Purchased.  Told in a series of diary entries, ship logs, telegrams, and phonograph recordings, Stoker’s novel recounts the efforts of Jonathan Harker, Lucy Westenra, Mina Murry, John Seward, Quincey Morris, Arthur Holmwood, and Abraham Von Helsing to rid themselves and the world of Count Dracula, a vampire who has left his castle in Transylvania and traveled to England in the hopes of finding new victims and spreading […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Bram Stoker

The Dead Hour by Denise Mina

November 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Little Brown and Company, 2006. 341 pgs. Received from PaperBackSwap. Paddy Meehan works the night shift for a Glasgow newspaper, shadowing the police as they’re dispatched on calls in the hopes it will mean being first on the scene to a major story. Called out to a domestic dispute, Paddy thinks this will be yet another night of no leads. After all, even the ritzy address doesn’t mean her editors will care about a domestic. But that […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Crime, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Denise Mina

Elemental by Amanda Curtin

October 28, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Scribe UK, 2016. Originally published 2013. 444 pgs. Purchased. In the 1970s, towards the end of her life, Meggie Duthie Tulloch sets out to recount her life from a young girl in a fishing village of northeast Scotland to an émigré in Western Australia for her granddaughter. She complies her memoirs into a series of notebooks, separating the story into three parts based on the elements that defined her life in that moment (water, air, and […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Oceania, United Kingdom • Tags: Amanda Curtin

Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll

October 14, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1922. 264 pgs. Purchased. First published in The Times during the 1920s, this collection of essays presents the proper setting and occasion for different recipes. There are essays for particular events – the wedding breakfast, the Sunday luncheon, and the country hunt – as well as for certain people – the too thin, the too fat, and the bachelor. I follow a handful of food blogs as I’m always on the hunt […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Food, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Agnes Jekyll

The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

September 30, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2017. Originally published 1931. 326 pgs. Purchased.  For the past two decades, the Stevens family has taken a two-week holiday in Bognor Regis on the southern coast of England. The family has their routine down; tasks and chores are handed out the night before in order to make sure they can leave their home at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich in time to catch the train via Clapham Junction to their holiday destination. Upon arrival, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: R.C. Sherriff