I loved this memoir about Coleman’s time working in a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. It was completely different from anything I’ve read before, and I enjoy reading about people who do things that I’ll never have the courage to do. In her early twenties, Coleman quit her job in England and backpacked around Bolivia. Wanting to do…
This is my second novel by Lisa See, and I felt they were similar in a lot of ways. Both Island of Sea Women and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane are slow-paced multigenerational family dramas, that cover a primary character from childhood to old age. Both concentrate a great deal on history and culture. Both involve…
I’ve been focusing on the same few challenges for a few years now, and I decided to mix it up a bit this year, but with this caveat: I don’t want to add pressure to my reading life. That means I’m not going to focus on what or how much I read. Instead, I’m choosing challenges that…
On the last day of the year, I’m thinking about reading challenges and my reading this year. I haven’t decided what challenges I’ll do in 2022, whether I’ll continue the ones below or start something new. 2020 and 2021 have given me reason to pause and think about why I participate in reading challenges. As…
I don’t always read as many books from other countries as I’d like, and I often find reading translated works challenging. This summer and fall I read quite a few books set in other countries, so I wanted to share these mini-reviews. I try to read books that are by authors that are from those…
I’m reading Reichl’s life backwards. Last year I read the excellent Save Me the Plums, so this year I decided to go back to her previous book, about her work as the restaurant critic for the New York Times. And while I enjoyed this one a bit less, Reichl is still an engaging and thoughtful…
I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I almost didn’t finish it. But my book club had so many good things to say about it, I persevered — though I ended up with mixed feelings. The story is about Nahr, a woman living in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. She…
This book is Pan’s memoir of a year when she decided to challenge herself to live like an extrovert. She explains that there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, only she’s an excessively shy one (a “shintrovert” as she calls herself), which means she’s probably missing out on friendships and career opportunities by not engaging…
This summer I read several powerful books about race that I’d encourage everyone to read, particularly if you’re interested in U.S. history and racism. In my last post, I wrote about Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. After Caste, I read Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, a Pulitzer Prize winner that describes racism and the justice…
As we’re halfway into the year, I’ve been thinking about how I’m progressing on my reading and blogging goals. Reading: In my New Year’s Resolution Post, I wrote about my reading goals for the year. At the end of June, I’d read 56 books, roughly half audiobooks. According to The StoryGraph, most of thee books…
This book was recommended to me last year, when I raved about Code Name Helene, a fictionalized story about a real-life World War II hero, Nancy Wake. A Woman of No Importance is a biography of Virginia Hall, one of the first and most recognized female undercover agents in France during World War II. Her…
Your first reaction to reading a book about the history of infectious diseases might be “why would I want to read that right now?” But this book was fascinating. It was published in 2017, well before COVID, yet it has so much to say about people react to the threat of infectious disease, and how we should…
The Book Stop 