A Children’s Place Bookstore (website, bookshop.org) hosted Sara Ryan for a reading for their newest book Mountain Upside Down.
Sara has written other books I’ve enjoyed such as Empress of the World and Bad Houses, so I’m very much looking forward to reading this book.
*book group selection | bolded means favorite
*Just What to Do by Kyle Lukoff and Hala Tahboub
6 Times We Almost Kissed [and One Time We Did] by Tess Sharpe
*The Wilderness of Girls by Madeline Claire Franklin
*Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho
The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
After Life by Gayle Forman
For whatever reason, Forman is at her best when death is involved. A slim book with bits that mesh perfectly.
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
Goldenseal by Maria Hummel
A Summer Affair by Elin Hilderbrand
The Strangers on Montagu Street by Karen White
It remains to be seen if the cardboard nature of the characters will outweigh the fun ghost stories and if I will finish this series.
The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand
I marvel at how many points of view Hilderbrand managed while never making the story seem jumbled.
*The Painter and the President: Gilbert Stuart’s Brush with George Washington by Sarah Albee and Stacy Innerst
Stress Resets: How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes by Jennifer Taitz
Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents by Alexandra Petri
Black Friend: Essays by Ziwe
The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream by Stefan Al
Good thesis, and Sefan Al really won the lottery with the cover. So stylish.
Draw Your Day: An Inspiring Guide to Keeping a Sketch Journal by Samantha Dion Baker
Given that the author is a graphic designer, artist, and has studied typography at Cooper Union, I’d call this “pretty” rather than “inspiring.” There’s no way any sketch journal I kept would come close to looking like hers. There also not much how-to other than “draw every day” (which is good advice).
Brothers by Alex Van Halen
This memoir is clear about one topic: Alex Van Halen really misses his brother. Written in a conversational style (or perhaps dictated and very lightly edited), this book provides insights into the Van Halen brothers (Ed, and Al, apparently) upbringing and their time in one of the greatest bands on the planet. It is not a cradle to grave account, things mostly drift off around the time David Lee Roth leaves the band. But to hear about the scrappy up-and-coming Van Halen, this is your book.
Perspective in Action: Creative Exercises for Depicting Spatial Representation from the Renaissance to the Digital Age by David Chelsea
Chelsea lives in Portland, and on page 97 you can see the Keller Auditorium and the Keller Fountain in a equrectangular panorama. Plus, there are some Benson Bubblers. There are some good instructions too, but first I must master one, two, and three-point perspective.
* Book Group Selection | Bolded Means Favorite
Slow month! It’s partially because as the end of the year approaches, I tend to not finish books. I think I was reading five on 12/31? Then I finished four of them on 1/1. Logging things on Goodreads caused this situation. I like to have credit for reading the books in the same year I read the books.
*The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin
The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman
Shadow Child by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
North Woods by Daniel Mason
*Homebody by Theo Parish
Green Money: How to Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for All by Kara Perez
488 Rules for Life by Kitty Flanagan
Goodreads reports that I read 224 books in 2024. They also reported that my top-read categories were picture and middle grade books. This is directly due to the focus of librarian book group this past year as one of our members was on notables. I’m hoping to read more grownup fiction in 2025.
* book group selection | bolded means favorite
*Noodles on a Bicycle by Kyo Maclear and Gracey Zhang
*We Who Produce Pearls: An Anthem for Asian America by Joanna Ho and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
*Built to Last by Minh Lê and Dan Santat
*Mama in the Moon by Doreen Cronin and Brian Cronin
*My Daddy Is a Cowboy: A Picture Book by Stephanie Seales and C. G. Esperanza
*The First Week of School by Drew Beckmeyer
To me, this felt like a subpar self-published Kindle book. But the rest of book group really enjoyed it.
*How It All Ends by Emma Hunsinger
*Island of Whispers by Frances Hardinge and Emily Gravett
*Quagmire Tiarello Couldn’t Be Better by Mylisa Larsen
*Tree. Table. Book. by Lois Lowry
*Puzzled: A Memoir about Growing Up with OCD by Pan Cooke
*The Secret Library by Kekla Magoon
This was great escapist reading after November 5. It’s also a sneaky historical fiction.
*Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie
*Libertad by Bessie Flores Zaldivar
*The Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb
*When the World Tips Over by Jandy Nelson
Alas, slog city. And I was looking forward to it.
*Thomas Jefferson’s Battle for Science: Bias, Truth, and a Mighty Moose! by Beth Anderson and Jeremy Holmes
*Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games by Samuel Sattin and Steenz
*Narwhal: Unicorn of the Arctic by Candace Fleming and Deena So’Oteh
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
The Girl On Legare Street by Karen White
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
The thing I want to gush about is a spoiler, so I won’t. But know that I am gushing!
Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
I found this through Pearl, by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie. It’s an engrossing memoir of time spent in a foreign environment, strain on a marriage, and choices the USA made in the early 2000s.
Skin & Bones by Renée Watson
Watson crams so much into this novel. And yet it never feels crammed.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary by Carson Ellis
This is a very niche book, but I’m the niche, so I loved it. Like Ellis, I also moved to Portland in the early 2000s. Like Ellis, I made friends, ate bagels, and did things. It was fun to notice the subtle nuances that her eight days of journal entries caught, like checking your email and being disappointed when there wasn’t any.
This is a great time capsule view of being mostly unencumbered, creative, and looking for a place in the world.
I really loved this book. It was one of my favorites of the year. But this particular copy had a fun surprise.
At one point, Lena, the main character is at church, and a guest preacher explicitly says that if a woman wants a man, she needs to shape up and have a thin body. And a previous reader wasn’t having it.
There was one more comment.
Thanks, previous reader, for leaving your comments (on post-it notes). I left them there for the next reader to find and enjoy.
*Book Group Selection | Bolded Means Favorite
*Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi
How did the Muslim ban affect individual U.S. Citizens? This book answers the question in an interesting and enlightening way. Alas, though, the poetry depended often on words
f
a
l
l
i
n
g
down the page, and the use of dramatic spacing.
Both of which felt cliched to this reader. None of the poems stood out, and I was left wondering why this novel in verse didn’t abandon the verse and write the interesting story it was telling in prose.
Dead Things Are Closer than They Appear by Robin Wasley
*Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay
*Not Like Other Girls by Meredith Adamo
*Twenty-Four Seconds from Now… by Jason Reynolds
*How the Boogeyman Became a Poet by Tony Keith
*The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté
Pick the Lock by A.S. King
One of my peccadillos is that I cringe when story-created song lyrics are present. And this is stuffed with story-created song lyrics. It was a rough go for me, but the book had an interesting way into how domestic violence affects families.
Red in Tooth and Claw by Lish McBride
Lish McBride does her thing (fantasy that doesn’t bug me, found family), but it’s a Western! What can she not do?
The House on Tradd Street by Karen White
I picked a book by Karen White off the shelf at my library, and by page 25, I realized that the book I was reading was one from later on in a series. I put it down and put a hold on this book, the first in the series.
There were a few things I didn’t love like the cliche of the main character subsisting on sugar and remaining slim and the love interest grabbing the main character’s arm to get her to stay and listen to him. (Not okay! Not only that, but later in the book, he hit another character in the jaw for doing the exact same thing.).
But this managed to hit the sweet spot of having ghosts but not being too scary. As someone who loves ghost stories but doesn’t want them to haunt her dreams, I will be checking out the second in the series.
p.s. The book I initially started reading was the seventh in the series! Seventh!
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
The book that has forever changed my use of the phrase “verbal communication.”
*Book group selection | Bolded means favorite
*Time to Make Art by Jeff Mack
*The Spaceman by Randy Cecil
*Not Nothing by Gayle Forman
*Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
*Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang
Geek Girl by Holly Smale
We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Lizzie & Dante by Mary Bly
Between Two Strangers by Kate White
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell
Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
The Bridesmaids Union by Jonathan Vatner
Vatner’s Carnegie Hill charmed me by being about self-involved rich people, but also incredibly relatable. I was less charmed by the Bridesmaids Union because the main character really needed to say no. And she didn’t. Repeatedly. So the novel could happen, I guess?
I’m also quite happy that my era of attending weddings was much more low key than the one this book depicts.
That Summer by Jennifer Weiner
Weiner finds an interesting and multilevel way into #MeToo.
The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther by Ruth E. Carter
*Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States by J. Albert Mann
*Book Group Selection | Bolded Means Favorite
*Let’s Go! by Julie Flett
*Ursula Upside Down by Corey R. Tabor
*Just Like Millie by Lauren Castillo
*Aloha Everything by Kaylin Melia George and Mae Waite
*The Night War by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
*Plain Jane and the Mermaid by Vera Brosgol
*With Just One Wing by Brenda Woods
*A Little Bit Super: With Small Powers Come Big Problems by Leah Henderson and Gary D. Schmidt
All These Things I’ve Done by Gabrielle Zevin
*The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
The Chandler Legacies by Abdi Nazemian
Because It Is My Blood by Gabrielle Zevin
In the Age of Love and Chocolate by Gabrielle Zevin
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin
Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau
The Hunter by Tana French
The Searcher by Tana French
The Hole We’re In by Gabrielle Zevin
Stand Your Ground by Victoria Christopher Murray
The Mitford Affair by Marie Benedict
Margarettown by Gabrielle Zevin
Carnegie Hill by Jonathan Vatner
Considering this books was populated with a bunch of rich people who want for little and are kind of spoiled, this was a surprisingly compelling novel. Kudos to Vatner for sketching a guy who could have been odious with a lot of nuance.
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison
Don’t let the exclamation point fool you. This is an overall downer of a book.
*The Bard and the Book: How the First Folio Saved the Plays of William Shakespeare from Oblivion by Ann Bausum and Marta Sevilla
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
Recommended reading: the three chapters where West chronicles her loss of love of stand-up comedy.
Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford
*Book Group Selection | Bolded Means Favorite
*Two Together by Brendan Wenzel
*Born Naughty: My Childhood in China by Jin Wang, Tony Johnston, and Anisi Baigude
*Break to You by Neal Shusterman, Debra Young, and Michelle Knowlden
Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Measure by Nikki Erlick
But How Are You, Really by Ella Dawson
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
Honey by Isabel Banta
A Winter in New York by Josie Silver
Need Blind Ambition by Kevin T. Myers
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra
Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner
With a decades-spanning plot and two instances where I gasped “No!” this was pretty much my perfect read.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Sometimes the dial on historical fiction is turned too much to the side where we establish scene by naming songs and describing clothes and hairstyles. That was the case here. While Frankie’s story resonated with me, I kept getting pulled out of it by too many historical details that didn’t add anything to the plot.
*Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992. Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, and a City on Fire by Paula Yoo
The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
Being the reader I was and am, I made sure to stock my growing-up trunk with important books from my childhood and adolescence. In no particular order:
I was given this Little House set when I was still a baby, so I got the yellow box edition. My friends who had their own set usually had the blue box edition. I liked the yellow one better. But then the next iteration was a nice gingham theme. I would have gone for that one too.
You can see that these books were read many times. First they were read to me, then I read them on my own, then I read them every summer. Sometimes I started at the end and ended at Little House in the Big Woods. When that happened, Mary regained her sight, rather than lost it.
My friend Cindy had a tiny book called the Paper Bag Princess, and I loved it so much (despite being in high school and thus “too old” for it) that she made me my own copy one Christmas.
She had fun adding the commentary on the back, which she adapted from actual blurbs on books in her possession. “Now a spectacular film from Orion!!” cracks me up.
My favorite Little Golden Book to read at my Grandparents’ house. It was originally my Aunt Carol’s book, and the paper dolls aspects had been lost years before I found it. I looked for my own copy for years before finding one in the toy store in Seaside during this trip. I did not include the book in my chronicle of the trip, and I have no idea why as it had been a decades-long quest. Anyhow, this was the original one.
Oh, Alice. This book, so many feelings. It was fun to listen to the series of episodes the podcast “You’re Wrong About” did, starting with Go Ask Alice Part 1. I also read Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, so it’s been a big year for Go Ask Alice.
This might have been my entry into Chris Crutcher. I loved how the descriptions of cross country running made me want to be a runner.
I read a lot of Cynthia Voigt, but these two made the cut. This is a loose sequel to Jackaroo, and I didn’t know how to pronounce the main character’s name Birle, so I stopped in a jewelry store in the mall and asked. Because we didn’t have the internet to pronounce things for us back then.
And here’s Jackaroo. My historical fiction preferences are quite clear.
When I watched the film The Princess Bride I had no idea there was a book! When I found this, I loved it so much I read it aloud to my family.
Fannie Flagg was a favorite author once the movie version Fried Green Tomatoes was released, and I read the book. But the description of the Miss America pageant in this book was hilarious, so I went with Daisy Fay over Fried Green Tomatoes.
Who the heck wouldn’t count the Outsiders as an important book from their youth? Probably kids now, as I’ve recently reread it and found it a bit stiff. But I sure loved it then. I also like this cover. It’s very of its time.
This is the book in my collection I find most cringeworthy. I really, really, really liked it though when it was released. At least my bodice ripper entry has a classy cover on it.
Here’s the book that probably no one has heard of. I loved the New York City immigrant 1940s experience. And it was also really sad. This one, I’m holding onto. Will I read it again? Maaaaaayyybeeee? What if it’s not that good?
A book I always thought of as a good companion to this one, though contemporary, was Walk Through Cold Fire by Cin Forshay-Lunsford. It’s too bad I didn’t track down a copy for the trunk as they seem to be scarce. There are currently three copies available on Thriftbooks and the prices range from $112 to $129. I’ll keep my eye peeled for it to turn up somewhere for a normal price.
I was a huge fan of The Secret Garden, but A Little Princess has always been my favorite Frances Hodgson Burnett book. And one MUST read the version with Tasha Tudor illustrations.
More historical fiction. This one took place in Hungary, pre-WWI.
And this sequel took place during the war. I’m pretty sure my mother read these as a child, and thus they came into my life. Good choices.
And another classic. I read this book several times, both as assignment and on my own.
And that’s the tour of my books. I hadn’t realized how few would be contemporary. Really just Running Loose. I’m a diehard historical fiction fan and have been since I was a child.
