Finished The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. I'd read it in high school and didn't like it at all. But this time around, it wasn't so bad. But thankfully it was short! 3 star.

It makes me so happy when peopke read the classics. Age does bring understanding and enjoyment that 14 year old kids just can’t muster

Next up: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau to fit the Pulitzer Prize winner category.

A Little Help Please.

DH can't read for long, so has taken to audiobooks for novels. Do you have favorite 'wells' to find these? Our library offers Libby and Hoopla -- maybe there are other good sources? He likes 'slice of life', mysteries, detective stories. Thank you!

Recent authors:

Michael Connelly

Stewart O'Nan

Ruth Rendell

Ann Patchett

I've enjoyed David Rosenfelt's mysteries with character Andy Carpenter, a defense attorney. They are fairly lighthearted as mysteries go, and often feature dogs. Audiobook choice isn't great with our Libby and Hoopla, so I sometimes use Audible.com.

Edited to add: The books are best read in order, to see changes and developments in the main characters. However, they are entertaining regardless and one that I especially enjoyed is Dog Day Afternoon.

I finished Still Life with Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. It was a very lovely escape and after reading a few "heavies" as well as lengthy, this was perfect.

I give it 4 stars.

I've never read anything else by her and I will look for more.

Thanks, stacey. Sounds right up his alley.

Beginning in the mid-'80s, Anna Quindlen had a column in the NYTimes called 'Life in the 30s'. It was beautifully written and coincided with my 30s, so I really loved it. Her novels have some of that flavor. Now off to see if I can find those columns....

I used to look forward to Anna Q every day in the times....

Yes, I had read the columns, but I never read anything more by her.

Just finished The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. What a good book! 4 stars, and it'd be great for book group, only it is old and probably hard to come by enough copies depending on the size of the group.

It's in print, but currently on backorder through bookshop.org. You can easily find used copies, however. https://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&title=keepers+of+the+house

I finished The Women. It was mostly predictable. But she was so bang on correct. She described so many things correctly. And I know now, that Vietnam is still an open wound. I'm so sorry elmer. I know you were told not to think about it, not to talk about it. You might be safe talking about it to some people, but you're still not allowed to talk to a lot of people about it. I know that a lot of the soldiers suffered their own personal horrors. And still do. After reading the book I think of Vietnam Veterans in much the same way I think of Holocaust Survivors. I just want to hug them all very tightly. I think the author had a really good handle on what happened.

Good book club material, but difficult reading.

I just finished The Broken Girls by Simone St. James for the category of a book set in school. I give it 4 stars. Would lead to good discussion if the book group is into that kind of story....private boarding school full of troubled girls, murder mystery, a ghost...

Next up for the category of a book set during a holiday, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

Who knows a book about the My Lai event? You'll notice I call it an event, and not a massacre. I have an open mind. It could be a massacre. It could be a lack of information. It could be heroin induced. Who knows a book about what happened?

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness, by Howard Jones. https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-lai-vietnam-1968-and-the-descent-into-darkness/18860636

ETA: if you want a good overview of the whole war, Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow is excellent.

DD1 and I are back from our short London jaunt. In Hatchards, an amazing bookstore, I saw a new John Boyne book, called Next of KIn, and I put a library hold on it as soon as we got home. In the same location, they have a display of rare books. Imagine a first edition of The Great Gatsby, without the dust cover, alas, and a first edition of Tender is the Night, with one. And a first edition of The Importance of being Earnest, which was pulled out of publication after the whole "Bosie thing".

Stoppard's The Invention of Love was just wonderful, as was the musical based on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If either transfers here, I would certainly do a repeat viewing.

I thawed all my library holds, so I will be back here soon.

faftris, can you feel the waves of jealousy coming off me? ;-)

Just finished Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Not my usual genre, but for what it was, it was good and exciting, though you have to leave room for lots of fantasy stuff. I'd give it 4 stars but not for book group. I read it to fulfill the "set during a holiday." It's a stretch. It was set in late October with lots of witches and evil people, but it didn't specifically reference Halloween, but I'm going with it.

Next up for the category of book recommended by a friend,

The Irish Boarding House by Sandy Taylor. Should be a quick read.

Bookwoman, all I feel from you are good vibes! You would have been amused at the number of people who left Invention of Love during intermission., and at the ones who were paging frantically through the program, looking for a synopsis of the plot. I guess either they were not up on their Horace or Housman, or they didn't realize that you have to do a bit of prep work before seeing any Stoppard.

Just finished The Irish Boarding House by Sandy Taylor. Fits the category as "recommended by a friend". GF gave me the book to read while I'm recuperating. It was a wonderful, sweet story. An easy read and good for the heart. I will be adding it to the 'Happy Reads" thread if I can find it. 4 star, but probably too fluffy for book group.

Next up, for the category of a book that received bad reviews will be On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Dug through the basement bookcase and found a paperback that was DH's from 1958. It has a price on it... 50¢!! Times have changed! I'll be very careful with it as the pages are delicate.

Annie, On the Road has been on my to-do list for a long time. I saw the scroll that Kerouac wrote it on at the NYPL. I will look forward to your review, since I respect your opinions.

I just read A Freewheeling Time: A Memoir of Greenwhich Village In the Sities ( link) by Suze Rotolo. It was suprisingly good and so interesting. She was the girlfriend in NYC from the very beginning, and is on the cover of said album. I thought her insights and stories were really endearing. A fair amount of photos as well. The nice part was she did not seem to have an agenda . I think you'd have to be a fan of Bob Dylan but it was a really nice memoir of the times as well.

I’ve just started Open Socrates and I think it is going to be very interesting.

Finally finished On The Road by Jack Kerouac. If it wasn't for this reading challenge, I'd've bailed on the book a long time ago. For me to like a book, it either has to be thought provoking, have characters I like or can relate to or at least relate to their struggles or have empathy for their history. This had none of those. Maybe it's a generational thing, maybe it didn't age well. Maybe it's I just don't understand what makes something a 'c*lt classic'. Eg, while I can appreciate the fun people have with Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is an *awful* movie. If you can relate to guys with no money bumming their way across the country, stealing, drinking, drugging, and treating the women in their lives like carp, have at it. Not for me.

Just finished Aesop’s Fables by Munro Leaf & Robert Lawson for the category, a book from your childhood. It was a lovely edition with beautiful illustrations. Don't think I ever read them all, though many are familiar. Some had me shaking my head, and others smiling out loud. I certainly think children would be better off if it were required reading rather than just posting the 10 commandments in schools!

Next up, for the category, a book my parents love, we'll they're not around to ask, but they were in the Arthur Godfrey era, so I'm sure they'd appreciate it: Arthur Godfrey's Stories I Like To Tell. I still remember my mother telling the story of her first clock radio. She'd set the alarm to radio to go off to get her up for work. She was so surprised when the first thing she heard the next morning was Arthur Godfrey in her room saying, "Well hello there!"

Annie -- I had the same reaction as yours to Kerouac. Ick.

My grandmother was a fan of Godfrey -- and Geritol, which I think he advertised.

Yesterday I finished The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. Thank you, Annie, for the recommendation. I'm going to give it 3 stars because I really liked the first 3/4 of the book a lot. But the ending wasn't good for me. I kinda thought it was morphing into Django Unchained. Maybe I would have been happier if it had ended in a similar vein. I just couldn't with the animals. But the first part was good, dreamy, weird, with that historical/cultural backdrop. But oh man, not somewhere I'd want to visit.

Just finished Arthur Godfrey's Stories I Like To Tell. It was a collection of jokes and anecdotes so it would fit for my parents or for a book that's funny. I may move it.

I have a bit to go to finish the Bottome short stories, and then I'll get into

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel for a book about the future. Not my usual genre, so we'll see.

Annie, have you read her Station Eleven? If not, it's also set in the future, and is her masterpiece. But all her books are good.

Bookwoman, yes I did for another reading challenge and did not particularly like it...it's generally not my thing, so I suspect I won't be enamoured with this one either. But I'll give it a go. Part of the fun of a reading challenge is to get you to read books you normally wouldn't.

I finished The Best Stories by Phyllis Bottome. I was reading it piecemeal between the other books and had only a few stories to finish. Definitely not a book group book. I'd give it 3+ stars in that, while some of the stories were terrific, others were only OK. Then again, unless I'm reading Saki or a few others, I generally don't cotton to short stories, unless they pack a wallop. But I was glad to read her stuff. I loved her The Mortal Storm which was made into a movie.

Annie,

Maybe I missed it, but did you mention the source of your reading challenge?

I'm a third of the way into Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. A blurb from New Yorker: "...Robinson is one of our best, bravest, most moral, and most hopeful storytellers." Time named him one of the heroes of the environment. And...it's an entertaining story! 4 Stars.

hhireno, it's our local library...42 books (40 categories but one is a trilogy)... from 12/15/25 to 3/15/25. They're supposed to have a prize for the winner...no idea what it is. I just enjoy the challenge and have fun picking the books for each category.

But popsugar runs one annually for the full year: https://www.popsugar.com/books/popsugar-reading-challenge-2025-49412160

Thank you, Annie. I forgot about Popsugar.

I brought my husband to our library used book sale yesterday. We bought 10 books for $12 - 3 for me, 3 large print for my Mum, and 4 for him. I don’t like to own books, so we’ll read them at our vacation place and then donate them to that library for resale.

We're about 1/2 way thru the challenge and I've read 23 books so far. But still it's a pace of 1 book in 2 days to complete. Not sure I'll make it. Some of the books are longer...though I've tried to keep some smaller ones in there too. Definitely *not* the time to play with Russian authors!!

I read Station Eleven probably 8 or 10 years ago ( well before the pandemic). It was a very good book and of course as the pandemic rolled out, I would think of that book which seemed too bizarre at the time. Still, it's not my genre either and I did not really care for it. I know it's very well regarded though so clearly, I'm not in the majority.

I just finished a very good read, a sweet adventure story, maybe a bit of coming of age as well, Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall. I know it was mentioned somewhere , not sure if it was here or some other forums I follow. It fit the bill for me, as I enjoy reading mostly for a nice diversion.Parts of it were perhaps the most realistic, but if I'm invested enough in the story and characters, which I was, I can go along for the ride. I really enjoyed the ride.

I give it 4.5 to 5 stars.

I am going to try Sipsworth next.

I have Sipsworth on my list for 'book about animals'.

For a quick-y to fulfill the "book of poetry" challenge, I read the short and very sweet Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...").

I finished Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. Meh. Not my thing, not for our book group. But it was a quick and easy read, but too much fluff for what was potentially a really interesting premise.

Next up On Freedom by Timothy Snyder for my nonfiction book group and for the 'nonfiction book' part of my reading challenge.

“BEYOND THE BIG LIE” author Bill Adair copyright 2024

I’m circling back to the book I mentioned here 2 weeks ago. I highly recommend it & it would be good for a book club providing the members are accepting of diverse political views. I found the book thought provoking & a bit scary. This book isn’t about a specific view, doesn’t take sides but is specifically about lying in social media, politics, journalism, talk shows etc. This book caught my attention when I saw it at my library because I had recently listened to discussions & expressions of concern about META & other social media discontinuing their fact checking operations. Bill Adair, the founder of the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking website PolitiFact, tells about the history of lying in politics and about the creation of the various fact checking organizations & their methodologies. Bill’s style of writing in this book is easy to read & interesting as well as informative. It’s no surprise to me that the biggest threat to our democracy is disinformation and misinformation - 2 very different things.

This book isn’t long - only 218 pages on the topic with pages 219 - 273 covering acknowledgements & source cites. It took me awhile to read though because I’d flip back to re-read some points or references when Bill wrote about them in later chapters. Sadly, this book might need updating given current happenings in DC in that the lying has increased.

KW -- Does the author have a name for the practice I see lately on news shows were guests 'answer' questions with slogans? I'd like to know what to call that, beyond obfuscation.

KW, it's on my list... I suggested it for my nonfiction book group, but there isn't much availability through the libraries at this point.

@chisue - no specific name for that. But, in Chapter 3 the section ”The Fox & Friends Couch” talks about the practice of quoting talking points but not having any discussion about the facts & meat behind those talking points.

I’ve included the chapter list of the book here. Chapters 1 & 12 on ”The Ministry of Truth” are very interesting. A situation I do remember hearing about but certainly was not fully aware of the abject failure it was.

I joined a book club that is reading the Feyman Lectures on Physics. We have finished Vol 1 and started Vol 2. It is interesting to dimly remember my college math and physics, recognize terms and concepts I last thought about 45 years ago, but sometimes it feels like work.

John, your club sounds like a Mensa level group. 😊

John Liu...Wow! That sounds like work!

Link to February 2025 Edition

Thanks, KW. Ah yes, of course. An all purpose name for the practice is already in front of us: 'Reynarding'.

I'll be looking for Adair's book. I just have to build up my strength between reality blows.

chisue - Indeed! As in Reynard the fox!😁 Is ’Reynarding’ now a verb? This book made me feel slightly better at reading & learning that the practice of spouting disinformation and misinformation is not new and that our freedoms have survived those times.