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

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff

November 22, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – eBook. HarperCollins, 2011. 432 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II”, Mitchell’s book recounts the 1945 effort to rescue an Army officer, a Women’s Army Corps officer, and an enlisted soldier after their plane crashed in present-day Papua, the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea. The two men and one woman were on board the C-47 plane along with 21 others for a sightseeing […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Oceania • Tags: Mitchell Zuckoff

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

Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth

May 10, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 288 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “One Summer Paddling Across the Far North”, Weymouth’s memoir covers the fourth months he spent canoeing the Yukon River from Canada’s Yukon Territory through Alaska to the Bering Sea. The Yukon is 2,000 miles long, the longest free-flowing river in the United States and the longest salmon run in the world. Each summer, king salmon (known as Chinook in Canada) migrate the distance of the Yukon to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Canada, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Adam Weymouth

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

April 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 1997. 192 pgs. Purchased. In 1991, a jar filled with scraps of paper was discovered buried in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. The papers document nearly three years in Dalia Grinkevičiūtė after she deported to a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 at the age of fourteen with her mother and older brother. Grinkevičiūtė had buried the papers in 1950, fearing they would be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, Delija Valiukenas

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

February 22, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Hebrew. Harper, 2015. Originally published 2011. 541 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “A Brief History of Humankind”, Harari’s book covers three “revolutions” that shaped the course of history – the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution – before delving into a lesson in how culture binds the world together and a short speculation about the future. Beginning about 70,0000 years, the Cognitive Revolution led to the evolution of Neanderthals and other […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Chunkster, Economics, Europe, Hebrew, Indigenious Peoples, Middle East, Nonfiction, North America, Religion, South America, Translated, United States • Tags: Yuval Noah Harari

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

November 27, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by Will Patton, Ann Marie Lee, and Danny Campbell. Random House Audio, 2017. 9 hours, 4 minutes. Library copy. Prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a tribe of Native Americans known as the Osage were among the richest people in the United States. Their wealth was derived from the oil under their tribal lands in Oklahoma; lands they were pushed onto from Kansas and other Plains states by white settlers and the American government. […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Ann Marie Lee, Danny Campbell, David Grann, Will Patton

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

August 23, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Ann Arbor Media Group, 2006. Originally published 1826. 414 pgs. Purchased. Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War (or, Seven Years’ War for non-Americans), the second novel in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales follows two young women named Cora and Alice Munro as they travel through the woods from Fort Edward to join their father at Fort William Henry. The two women are escorted by Major Duncan Heyward of the British Army and a singing teacher named Gamut, and […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, New England, North America, United States • Tags: James Fenimore Cooper

Talking to My Country by Stan Grant

July 15, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Scribe, 2016. 230 pgs. Purchased. Grant, an Australian television journalist for CNN and member of the Wiradjuri people, begins his memoir with three intriguing sentences: “These are the things I want to say to you. These things I have held inside or even worse run from. It is not easy, what I have to say, and it should not be easy.” These difficult things are centered around the historical and ongoing treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Oceania, ReadDiverse • Tags: Stan Grant

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

January 8, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — print. Harper Perennial, 2003. Originally published 1993. Print. 354 pgs. Purchased. Three years after the events of The Bean Trees, young Turtle and her adoptive mother Taylor (formerly known as Marietta) are on their way home from visiting the Hoover Dam when Turtle announces she saw someone go over the ledge of the dam. A little girl of few words, it takes Taylor some time to pull all the necessary information from Turtle. But she believes her daughter is telling the truth […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Adoption, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, North America, Pacific Northwest, United States • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

November 5, 2015 by Christina

Fiction – print. Harper, 1998. Originally published 1988. 272 pgs. Library copy. Twenty-three year old Marietta buys a used car and sets her sights west leaving behind her small town in Kentucky and the single mother who raised her. Rechristening herself as Taylor Greer, Marietta has no plan as to where she’s headed or what she plans to do for money. All she knows is that a young woman in the 1980s named Taylor wouldn’t allow herself to be tied […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Adoption, Book Club, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, North America, United States • Tags: Barbara Kingsolver