Books I read March 2024

Almost halfway through April, I just realized that I had not yet written my post about books I read in March. With March ending on Easter, followed by preparing for a trip to visit family and see the eclipse, I had completely forgotten about it. But here it is now.

I hadn’t thought it would be too difficult to find “a book with a neurodivergent main character,” but even so I was surprised to discover I had started two of them in one day (one was an audiobook, the other a hardcover). And I hadn’t been looking for that in either of them. I picked The Fire, the Water, and Maudie McGinn by Sally Pla because the title caught my eye and the premise – including the fact that Maudie is neurodivergent – appealed to me. I often find children’s book make great audiobooks for riding my exercise bike, because they always keep the story moving and make me want to hear what comes next. Books like this one do even more than that, because it explores themes that are often not easy to talk about without getting preachy, and for the most part it shows people as a realistic mix of positive and negative characteristics (it’s hard to think of anything positive about the stepfather). I think it would be great reading for anyone who has experienced being shamed for being the way they are, for whatever reason, as well as for people who want to be better at relating to those individuals who have experienced it. It doesn’t go into unnecessary details of the bad stuff that happens but doesn’t minimize them either, and throughout it has a strong message of hope.

The second one was a book I had already chosen for “a book with an enemies-to-lovers plot,” but Two Wrongs Make a Right by Chloe Liese also has a neurodivergent main character. I picked it in large part because of the connection to Much Ado about Nothing (which I have not read but had of course heard of), and I hoped it would be a relatively painless way to read a book for this prompt (since I don’t care for romance books in general). It’s a moderately interesting story, particularly because of the neurodivergent aspect, but I got tired of the non-stop sexual tension and eventual sex scenes.

I’m not sure just how well No Two Persons by Emma Bauermeister fits the prompt “a book about a writer,” since only the first of the ten characters in this book is a writer. But the whole book is about the novel written by this writer and how it plays a role in the other characters’ lives, so I decided it would count. Besides, I am very glad that the prompt led me to read this book, because it is one of my favorite books so far this year. I have read reviews that criticize it as being shallow, failing to fulfill its promise of exploring how books affect people in so many different ways. But I loved the writing and I loved getting to know each of these different people, and I’ll happily read something else by Emma Bauermeister.

I didn’t pick The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker because it was “a book with at least three POVs” (since I didn’t know it had those different POVs when I started), but rather because it is a sequel to The Golem and the Jinni, which I enjoyed so much when I read it several years ago. As it happens I have read four other books already this year that have at least three POVs (including the book by Emma Bauermeister, which has ten), but the others all fit other prompts, and this one doesn’t, so it gets this prompt. It was interesting to see where the lives of the golem and the jinni had gone since the events of the first novel, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. Perhaps that is because it was the initial exploration of what it meant to be a non-human in a human society that so intrigued me in the first novel. Perhaps it is because in the first novel the two of them seemed to be finding a way to adapt and cope with human society even if they would always remain separate from it, while in this novel things get much more complicated for them. The first one seemed much more characterized by hope, while this one seems to have much less of that quality.

A prompt like “a book from a genre you typically avoid” is not one I was happy to see in this year’s reading challenge, especially because other prompts already are requiring me to read romances and a horror novel, both genres I prefer to avoid. But then I discovered that our library has eleven volumes of the manga series Spy x Family by Tetsuya Endo. My husband and I have been watching the anime series made from the manga series, and while I’m not a fan of either manga or anime, this one interested me enough to watch it with him. I like seeing how the three people who make up this “family” (put together for purposes of a spy mission) interact with each other and with other people. Besides, since it’s in Japanese (with English subtitles), it’s nice to once in a while be able to recognize a Japanese word that we know (we’re learning Japanese using Duolingo).

For “a book that features dragons” I came across the audiobook A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan. I didn’t know how well I’d like it but it sounded promising enough. It’s set in a world rather like ours but where the animal kingdom happens to include dragons. Lady Trent is a young woman fascinated by dragons, and despite prejudices against woman scholars (it takes place in what would be the Victorian era) and the difficulties of travel, she begins to make a place for herself as a student of natural history. As it turns out, I just love the way Lady Trent tells her story, and how she describes the development of scientific knowledge. I imagine if dragons were real, the development of scientific knowledge about them would probably happen much as she describes. This book is just the beginning of her life story – I’m not sure how many volumes there are in all but I’m already in the middle of the third.

I had no idea how to find “a book about a 24-year-old,” but in the discussion of this prompt on goodreads.com, someone suggested Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin. It happens to also fit the prompt “a book with an enemies-to-lovers plot,” which meant it had some romance involved, but based on the way it was described I thought I would like it. And I did, for the most part. I kept getting annoyed with Hana for some foolish choices she makes, but I enjoyed reading her perspective on being Muslim in Canada, such as wanting a radio station where she is an intern to do a program about Muslims but not focus on the usual stereotypes. There is a lot of talk about food (her mother runs a restaurant, and the “enemy” is a young man opening another restaurant nearby that may put theirs out of business), and I thought it would be nice to have a bit more idea what the foods and flavors were, but probably I simply don’t have the right frame of reference for that.

I initially selected Ironweed by William Kennedy for the prompt “a book set 24 years before you were born,” but then realized it would work perfectly for “a book with a one-word title you had to look up in a dictionary,” which was the prompt I had thought I might have the most trouble with this year. (Ironweed is a wildflower with purple blooms.) It was moderately interesting and somewhat educational in giving insights into the lives of people living on the margins of society (or rather, those who were living that way in 1938 – I have no idea how it compares to today). But I can’t say I found it an enjoyable book to read, though I don’t know how much that is the writing style and how much the subject matter.

Since I had chosen to use Kennedy’s book for a different prompt, I ended up picking The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton for the book set 24 years before I was born. It actually starts before 1938 and finishes later, but the bulk of the story takes place in 1938. This one, in contrast to Kennedy’s book, I enjoyed very much, despite the difficult subject matter at times – it is, after all, about getting children out of Hitler’s Germany, and while it doesn’t go into great detail on the cruelty of the Nazis, there is plenty enough. I particularly liked knowing that it was based on the true story of the work of Truus Wijsmuller in getting many Jewish children out of Germany to safety. Despite the horrors of the Nazi regime and the dangers involved in what she does, it is a story of hope.

One prompt I was particularly not looking forward to was “an autobiography by a woman in rock ‘n’ roll.” In the past couple of years I have read at least two books dealing with rock musicians, and didn’t care for either one. Those people didn’t seem to have much in the way of moral character, and anyway, why would I want to read about people who played music I didn’t care for? But when I saw someone mention A Natural Woman, I recognized the name Carole King from the song “Beautiful” that our community chorale is singing in a concert this month. I had been somewhat puzzled by the song and was curious to learn what was behind it. Once I read what King said about how she came to write the song it made a lot more sense. Beyond that, I enjoyed reading the story of her life, both personally and professionally.

I had read The Folly of Prayer: Practicing the Presence and Absence of God by Matt Woodley for a Bible study I led around eight or ten years ago. I generally try to read one or two books on prayer each year, and I decided that I wanted to reread this one. I think my reactions were similar to the first time I read it. It doesn’t tell how to pray, but is more about dealing with some of our feelings and habits related to prayer. While I might wish for a “this is how to pray” book, I’d probably find it no more helpful in the end. I think of Woodley’s book less as a way to get started praying and more as help in not quitting. It reminds us that it’s OK to tell God exactly how we feel, to expect an adventure rather than a smooth road, and – perhaps most important – he finishes by saying that the only way to learn to pray is by praying.

I picked up with rereading Jan Karon’s Mitford books with A Common Life. I don’t know what I thought of it the first time I read it, but this time it struck me as very odd, to go back in time to the wedding, which had taken place in one of the earlier volumes. It’s shorter than the other books, and makes me wonder if it is the result more of needing to meet the requirements of a book contract than having ideas for a new book. It’s not bad, just feels like a rehash of what I had read previously. But since I’m rereading the whole series, I can hardly expect anything new, even if I had forgotten a lot of details over the years. And it is light reading with nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout, what I was looking for in my bedtime reading.

Books I read February 2024

Since a number of prompts for this year’s PopSugar Reading Challenge are particularly challenging, I’ve been thinking about allowing myself to “double-dip” this year, counting a single book for more than one prompt, which I have chosen not to do in previous years. But so far this year, I seem to be finding more than one book for the same prompt as much as one book for more than one prompt.

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz, the February selection for our library book club, clearly was a book with a title that is a complete sentence, but I quickly saw that it also would work for a book where someone dies in the first chapter, so I chose to use it for that prompt. As for the story itself, I was not overly impressed. It was an OK mystery, but I didn’t find it appealing enough to want to read anything else by Horowitz. I don’t mind that he made himself a character in the book, but I didn’t think it added to the book all that much either.

I suppose Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin could also count as a book with a title that is a complete sentence (in the imperative mood), but I selected it specifically as a book written by an incarcerated or formerly incarcerated person. It also is a book with at least three POVs – enough that I had trouble keeping track of how each was related to the others, and as with a lot of books with multiple POVs, I found it hard to really get interested in any one character because it kept changing. I certainly learned about life for people in a very different time and place and culture, particularly with religious experiences and mindsets very different from mine. But as with the book by Horowitz, I didn’t feel inclined to go read more by the author.

The Fragile Threads of Power, on the other hand, was one I picked in part because it was by V.E. Schwab, whose book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was one I had enjoyed so much. But I also picked it because it conveniently turned out to be a book with 24 letters in the title. Unfortunately it also turned out to be a book with at least three POVs – if anything, even more POVs than Baldwin’s book, and it took me nearly the entire book to get a fairly good sense of which characters were in which “London,” as this also deals with parallel worlds. From reading reviews afterward, I realized that it follows her Shades of Magic trilogy, which I have not read, and if I had perhaps I’d have been better able to make sense of the world(s) and characters in this novel. I might go back and read them. Or not. I think it was the new characters in this book that I liked most.

I definitely picked Paladin’s Faith by T. Kingfisher because it was the fourth in a series I have been reading by this author. I still think the first book in the series was the best, but this was, like the next two, enjoyable reading. And near the end I realized that it would also fit for “a book in which a character sleeps for more than 24 hours.” It’s hardly a major feature of the book, but there’s nothing in the prompt that suggests it needs to be.

I didn’t pick Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin because it is a book with a title that is a complete sentence, but that turned out to be an extra benefit. I chose it because it has excellent reviews and could fill in some of the very large gaps in my knowledge about the African continent. It’s a mix of history, critique of Western stereotypes about Africa and Africans, information about African culture (including one essay just about Jollof Rice), and evidence of a promising future. I may end up counting it as a non-fiction book about Indigenous people – it depends what else I end up reading over the next ten months.

Other books I read simply did not fit any of the prompts for this year. Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships by Nina Totenberg would have worked great last year for a celebrity memoir, and in fact I chose it in large part because I had read Ari Shapiro’s memoir last year and he talked about working as an intern with Nina Totenberg. I had expected, based on the title, that it would be primarily about Totenberg’s relationship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but it turned out to be primarily Totenberg’s memoir with a focus on a number of friendships, including that with RBG. So I learned more about Totenberg and less about Ginsburg than I had expected, but it was still fascinating in all the stories it told.

Another fascinating non-fiction book was Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal. I really enjoy books that tell how things work, and I liked how Agrawal expanded on the story of each invention to show how the same principle was adapted into new inventions. I had never thought of rivets as adaptations of nails, or gears as adaptations of wheels. And I certainly had not realized how many different kinds of devices can be called pumps. Agrawal makes a point of including stories of minoritized people who invented these things or improved how they worked, so I learned about a number of people I had never heard of before.

I really don’t remember why I put Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March on my TBR list, but I know it was within the past couple of months, so I tried to find a prompt it would fit in the reading challenge. I couldn’t find one, so I must have just read a good review and thought I would like it. And I did – it’s both historical fiction and a murder mystery (and a bit of a romance), set in India during a period of its history I was not familiar with and in places I knew almost nothing of. It’s a relatively slow-paced book for a murder mystery, which was fine with me because I also enjoyed the main character (a former military man discharged due to medical issues, always trying to do the right thing though it risks his happiness and sometimes his life) and the setting.

Books I read January 2024

A new year means a new PopSugar Reading Challenge. This year’s challenge is, in the opinion of a number of readers who participate in the challenge-related discussions at Goodreads.com, more challenging than usual because some of the prompts are so specific. Several of the prompts are related to the number 24. It won’t be hard to find books that were published in a year ending in “24” or a book published 24 years ago, but how do you go about finding a book about a 24-year-old? Previous years there have been prompts to read a book that takes place in one day (not a prompt I care for, as it happens), but this time it’s “a book that takes place over the course of 24 hours,” which would seem to me to indicate that it needs to take the full 24 hours, not just take place within the 24-hour span.

There are three separate prompts related to romance, not a genre I care for even when it’s not made more specific by limiting it to “second-chance romance” or LGBTQ+ romance. There’s “an autobiography by a woman in rock ‘n’ roll,” which is perhaps one of the least appealing to me so far. I have no interest in rock ‘n’ roll or the musicians – women or men – who make it, even aside from the question of whether someone whose preferred form of expression is in music will be an effective writer of her own story (though I suppose someone successful enough will likely have a ghostwriter). As for “a horror book by a BIPOC author,” I avoid horror books completely, and trying to find one I would consider reading is difficult enough without limiting the pool of authors to choose from.

I thought about trying a different reading challenge, as some others plan to do. But I’ll give this one a try at least for a few months. After all, I managed the first two prompts with no trouble. I was somewhere in the middle of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss when I realized it could be considered “a bildungsroman.” It was the monthly choice for our local library book club – though unfortunately due to a winter storm we didn’t end up having our book club meeting, so I don’t know yet what anyone else thought of the book. I thought it was an interesting story of a young man discovering his powers (it is a world where magic is part of the academic curriculum) and trying to solve a mystery about the person who killed his parents. It’s quite a long book, though, and I’m not sure whether I’ll tackle the sequel.

Two more books that I was going to read anyway were Hard Time and Saving Time by Jodi Taylor. The sequels to Doing Time, which my husband gave me for Christmas a few years ago, these are two of the next three books in the series, which my husband and sons gave me for Christmas this year. This series is a spinoff from her wonderfully entertaining Chronicles of St. Mary’s, which is all about time travel. I really don’t know quite what year is considered the “present” in these books – it was probably mentioned at some point in the St. Mary’s books but I haven’t gone digging through them to figure out. And of course with a book about time travel, it’s hard to pin down the time frame in which it is set. But I’m pretty sure these books count as “a book set in the future.” Whether they do or not, they are very enjoyable to read.

Three of the books I finished in January were books I started in December. My last book for last year’s reading challenge took me all of the last week of December to finish, so I set aside these others until the new year. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride was one I had seen recommended by readers on Goodreads.com, and when I saw it also on the shelf of books recommended by library staff at the college library, I decided to read it. I wouldn’t say I disliked it, but it has so many characters that it was hard to keep track of them and their varied stories, or to figure out what one had to do with another. Eventually they all came together at the end, but I just didn’t find it as appealing as a number of other readers clearly did.

Brandon Sanderson’s The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, on the other hand, was one I enjoyed a great deal (like just about everything I have read by Sanderson), and when I was finished I recommended it to my husband, who also enjoyed it. It’s not actually set in medieval England, since it is about travel to an alternate dimension rather than time travel, and this version of medieval England has some noticeable differences, particularly that magic is real. But what makes the book most interesting is learning – along with the narrator – who he is and what he is doing there (since he doesn’t remember much of anything when he first regains consciousness upon arriving), and then once he has learned that, what he is going to do about it.

The third book I had started in December but not finished until the first week in January was To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It’s considered part of her Oxford Time Travel series, but it is intended to be humorous rather than serious, like the other books. I find I often have trouble appreciating much of what many other people find humorous, and this was a good example. I saw from reader reviews, however, that I was hardly alone in not enjoying this book nearly as much as the others it is connected to. But Connie Willis is a good storyteller, so I can’t say I disliked it, I just was disappointed in it compared to the other books I have read by Willis, which were wonderful.

Since it is not nearly as easy as usual to find books for this year’s reading challenge, my next choice was another book by Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. For a good chunk of the book, I kept thinking, this is moderately interesting but what is the point of what is going on? Eventually it really came together and by the end I appreciated it as much as other books by Sanderson, with its meaningful insights into human thought and behavior as well as a unique setting and plot.

My final book in January was Starter Villain by John Scalzi. I don’t remember now when or why I put it on my list of books to read, though since it’s by Scalzi I’m sure it didn’t take much for me to decide it would be good. Someone suggested it for this year’s reading challenge for the prompt “a book where someone dies in the first chapter,” but when the first sentence of the book revealed that someone had already died, I decided that didn’t count. Of course it was worth reading anyway, simply for the entertainment value. It would be hard to describe the story in a way that would not sound somewhat ridiculous – there is a lot of crazy stuff going on – but Scalzi makes it work.

Books I read December 2023

I didn’t read as many books as usual in December (making it the only month this year that I didn’t read more than ten), though my page count (about 1650) was higher than three other months when I read more books. I had one prompt left for the PopSugar 2023 Reading Challenge, which I knew would take me the longest: “the longest book (by pages) on your TBR list,” because I knew I would have the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. Technically, The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet is a set of four novels, republished in one volume in 1989. When I bought it (probably around 1990), I thought of it as a single story in four parts (which it is), and intended to read it that way. But 821 pages is a long book, and somehow I was always too busy for a book that size, and it stayed on the shelf (or at least always wound up back on a shelf after we moved – I moved four times since then).

Finally, with this prompt in the 2023 reading challenge, I decided it was time to read the saga. It took me a full month to read it, finishing with less than three hours to go before the year ended. It was slow going through the first two parts, necessary setting up of characters and events but not a whole lot to really pull me into the story. Besides, I discovered it is not easy to hold an 821-page paperback! Finally in the third part, with the introduction of Llewelyn’s wife Eleanor (though at this point she is only married by proxy, a ritual that certainly seems strange to us in our society), it took on new emotional depth and renewed interest. And even though I knew, in a general sense, how the book had to end for the Welsh heroes, it made fairly good reading right through the end (which was well-written). I feel like I know this bit of Welsh and English history now, though I realize this was a fictional account. I’m not sure I’ll pick up any history books to read more about the period, but I might.

Looking over the list of books I’ve read this year for the PopSugar reading challenge, I can see that historical fiction is the prompt I read the most books for (ten). I didn’t particularly set out to do that – it’s just the kind of books I like reading. Another that I didn’t set out to read multiple books for was “a book that features two languages,” but in early December I added three more to this category. My husband and I have started learning Japanese using Duolingo, and I went to the library looking for children’s books written in both English and Japanese, to see if I could at least recognize the hiragana symbols (and use the English to figure out what the words meant).

Words to Make a Friend: A Story in Japanese and English by Donna Jo Napoli is a very nice children’s picture book, with beautiful pictures and a simple story about how understanding each other doesn’t always require understanding the words. It doesn’t have the Japanese written in hiragana symbols, however, instead using the Roman alphabet (what English – and all the other languages I’ve studied previously – use). So I also got out another children’s book, The Discovery of Anime and Manga: The Asian Hall of Fame by Philip Amara, which does have the Japanese words written using Japanese symbols (a mix of hiragana and kanji, and no doubt some katakana as well). The font colors used for the Japanese words were unfortunately often not a good contrast to the background, which made them hard to make out. I did pick out the word for “anime” at least, and occasionally managed to spot a word or two I recognized from Duolingo lessons. Plus it was very interesting history, something I knew nothing about because I don’t share my husband and son’s interest in anime.

Having read those, I thought it would be interesting to find a bilingual book written in German and English, and found an ebook, Learn German II: Parallel Text by Polyglot Planet Publishing. It’s not a children’s book by any means, and while I mostly got the sense of what I was reading just from the German text, there were often words that I didn’t recognize and had to get from the English translation. I hope that the German portions were written in better German than some of the English translations, which clearly needed correcting by a native English speaker. The stories were mostly people telling about their own experiences of travel, and were moderately interesting, but hardly compelling. The latter portion of the book had the same stories again but without the English translation, and I was pleased to find that I could read these and mostly understand them (of course it helped having recently read them with the help of the English translation).

Paladin’s Hope by T. Kingfisher is the third in Kingfisher’s The Saint of Steel series (I’m waiting for the fourth to be available through the library). Like the other two, it features a paladin (of the now-dead “god” called the Saint of Steel) – a different one in each book – who is trying to find a murderer and also finds himself falling in love and afraid to allow the relationship to develop (paladins being both called to a life of danger and with a strong tendency to self-recrimination). It’s different enough that I enjoyed the story, however, even if not as much as the first in the series, which I still think was the best.

Ellie Engle Saves Herself by Leah Johnson is a children’s book (I’ve found these are generally good for listening to while riding my exercise bike) about dealing with being different, and about love and friendship. It begins with Ellie suddenly finding herself with superpowers (able to hear the faintest of sounds and able to bring dead plants and animals back to life). While many stories of people with superpowers focus on saving the world, and the powers are generally portrayed as a positive thing, here Ellie finds that her powers isolate her. Many people accuse her of trickery, and even most of those who know the powers are real are uncomfortable around her. Meanwhile she is dealing with all the usual challenges that go with middle school. It’s a well-told story, fun and also containing wisdom for living.

I recognized the name Ari Shapiro from listening to All Things Considered on NPR, but I knew nothing else about him until I listened to The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening. I had expected it to be mostly a series of anecdotes about people he has met and talked with in the course of his work for NPR, and it does contain a good many of those, but it is essentially a memoir, starting with his childhood. While it’s not quite the book I was expecting it to be, Shapiro is (unsurprisingly) a good storyteller, and I enjoyed learning about his life as well as about the people and issues he has covered.

I was looking for more non-fiction, and thought The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel sounded interesting, especially having read about fictional art thieves in October. Stéphane Breitwieser succeeded in stealing an astonishingly high number of valuable items before he was finally caught. In large part this was because he selected smaller, out-of-the-way museums with relatively little security. His methods would never have worked on the well-secured items, held by the most prestigious museums, at the center of Portrait of a Thief. He also made no attempt to make money off his pilfered treasures, so there was very little trail for detectives to follow. There is some discussion of the art itself and the related history, but more about Breitwieser and his methods and speculation about his psychological state. It was interesting, but I admit I’d have preferred more about the art and the history – I got tired of Breitwieser as a person pretty quickly.

My last book of the year, besides the saga by Pargeter, was Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. It’s a prequel to Legends and Lattes, which my husband and I enjoyed listening to on our trip to Tennessee last spring. Prequels can be disappointing, but I thought it was probably as good as the first (or is it second now?) book. The action is centered in a bookshop this time, rather than a coffee shop, still hardly a typical locale for an orc to feel at home. There are a number of other non-human creatures, both good and evil, swordfights, black magic, a love affair. I have no idea whether Baldree will add any more books to the series, but if he does, I’ll plan on reading them.

Books I read November 2023

As it gets near the end of the year, I’m down to the last few prompts in the PopSugar 2023 Reading Challenge. I had thought that “a book about a holiday that’s not Christmas” would not be difficult, but the suggestions I found were either books I had read or books not available through the library. Finally, in early November, I found a selection of Thanksgiving-related books on display at the library, and I selected A Quilter’s Holiday by Jennifer Chiaverini. It’s actually about the day after Thanksgiving (although I’ve seen it described as a “heartwarming Christmas story), which a group of quilters have chosen as a day for working together on their quilting projects (many of which will be Christmas presents). It’s part of a series, and from reviews it seems that a lot of it is a retelling of events from earlier in the series, so it’s probably just as well I’d never read any of the earlier books. I don’t quilt, but I like making things, so I could relate to that aspect of the story. It’s a nice holiday story (but I still won’t call it a Christmas story).

Another difficult prompt was “a book you should have read in high school.” If it means a book that I was assigned and didn’t read, well, there aren’t any of those. If it means a book that I think should have been assigned that wasn’t, there are so many books that could be profitably studied in high school that one can’t be assigned all of them in four years, and I can’t think of any I would consider “essential” that were not assigned. I finally thought of one assignment that left it up to me to select the books, for a term paper in Western Civilization (what would be called a “dual credit” college course today) describing 19th century Russia based on 19th century Russian literature (a topic I chose from a list of topic ideas). I spent so much time reading the first novel I picked, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (which I found very engrossing and kept forgetting to take notes on for the term paper) that I didn’t have much time to read as many other books as I should have, or at least not as thoroughly. So I decided to pick one other book of 19th century Russian literature.

I picked Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky because I had been so impressed with Crime and Punishment, and because I was intrigued by descriptions of it an existentialist novel before the birth of existentialism as a philosophy. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t pick this one to read for that term paper, because it would have given me very little material to use for my paper. There is a mention of an official deciding whether to accept bribes, and the narrator challenges another man to a duel, and some brief descriptions of his home and his servant. But he doesn’t fit well in society (his personality/character is not one you’d want in your circle of friends), so mostly the reader just learns about his self-absorbed thoughts and feelings. No doubt there’s plenty of literary value to it, but I found it hard to appreciate – it’s the sort of book that I’d learn much more from in a literature class, I think. I did find a book review that helps in explaining it, but that was after I had finished reading it.

Probably the hardest prompt was “a book that started out as fan fiction.” People disagree as to exactly what constitutes fan fiction, with some insisting it has to be written by an amateur writer, while others include books by professional writers that use characters and setting from their favorite books (or movies or TV shows or perhaps even video games). Then there is also the question of what it means that the books “started out” as fan fiction – does that mean that it became something other than fan fiction? And how do you go about finding fan fiction? When I did searches of the library catalog, it listed books in which a character writes fan fiction, and fiction by writers with the name Fan. It also listed some actual fan fiction, all of it children’s book based on Minecraft.

When I was a Junior Achievement volunteer in a classroom for students with special needs several years ago, one of the students was a huge fan of Minecraft – that was really the only subject he seemed at all interested in. I googled it out of curiosity, but I had no real interest in the game beyond trying to understand what fascinated him so much about it. Since these Minecraft-themed books seemed to be all the fan fiction I could find, however, I decided to give a couple of them a try. (From what I’ve read, a great deal of fan fiction is romance stories, and children’s Minecraft stories appealed to me more than that.) First I read Tales of an 8-Bit Kitten: A Call to Arms by Cube Kid. It was a fairly quick read, which was good because I didn’t find the story very interesting. It gave me some idea of the components of Minecraft, though – Villagers and warriors and zombies, quests and abilities and weapons, experience points and levels – much of it more or less familiar to me from my husband’s role-playing games.

The other book I had chosen was Zombie Swap, part of Zack Zombie’s Diary of a Minecraft Zombie series. I liked this one much better, because the story was one anyone could relate to, whether or not you know anything about Minecraft. Zombie and his human friend Steve have swapped bodies, and Zombie is trying to figure out how to fit in as a human, with unfamiliar things like changing his clothes and taking showers (he never does seem to figure out that talking on his phone in the shower is why the phone keeps dying). Even more difficult, he is trying to fit in at middle school – a challenge for most humans. It’s a fairly short chapter book, which I enjoyed enough that I might actually consider reading more of the series to see what Zombie is like when he’s not trying to act like a human.

The other kind of “fan fiction” I chose to read was by Claudia Gray (a pseudonym – I have no idea what her real name is), who has written dozens of books so is hardly an amateur writer. But she chose to set her book, The Murder of Mr. Wickham, in the home of two characters from Jane Austen’s novel Emma, and the Knightleys have invited a number of guests who are characters from other Jane Austen novels to a house party, including the Darcys from Pride and Prejudice, which is the only Jane Austen novel I have read. So I knew nothing about the Wentworths, the Bertrams, or the Brandons, and I found it quite difficult to keep track of who was who. Since I didn’t know anything about them, I could hardly object to how Gray develops their characters in this novel, but after reading reviews by other readers who did not think Gray did justice to Austen’s characters, I decided I am not a fan of fan fiction, at least not when it involves re-using another author’s characters for one’s one purposes. (I felt similarly about reading March by Geraldine Brooks earlier this year.) Re-use the setting if you like, and give another author’s characters small parts where they act as they did in the original novel, but create your own characters to explore and develop rather than repurposing someone else’s, even if you think you know them well enough to extrapolate from what the original author wrote.

I read two more books in Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series, The Dark Angel and The Stone Circle. The Dark Angel is set in Italy, and while the mystery at the heart of the plot was not all that great, there was some interesting history, especially about Monte Cassino, which I had recently learned about in one of the books I read in October. And as always it was interesting to revisit the familiar characters and see how they are getting along. With The Stone Circle we see Ruth back in Norfolk, and it has a lot of the elements of the very first book in the series, not only the setting but also links to the crime that first got Ruth involved with Harry Nelson. I liked it better than the last few books I had read in the series, and I hope the next one will be as good.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs had been recommended by the library director at work and it interested me for the interesting twist on magic it uses, where spells have to be written in books, with ink made from blood, then read aloud by a different person. It’s really a book about people, though, with magic as a plot device. It’s about what people will do for power, and what people will do for love, and which will prevail. Mirrors play a significant role in the plot, as do palindromes (which have a mirror-like aspect), including one in Spanish (which particularly interested me, as I don’t remember ever having encountered it while living in Spain and getting my Masters in Spanish).

Since I had enjoyed the books I read by T. Kingfisher in September and October, I read some more. First there was Nettle and Bone, which I enjoyed so much that I was disappointed when it ended. I really got to like the characters, which the narrator of the audiobook did a great job of bringing to life, each with a voice that seemed to perfectly fit the character. It’s a good plot also, but it was the characters that really made the book for me. During the same week or two that I was listening to that audiobook, I was also reading the ebook Paladin’s Strength, a sequel to Paladin’s Grace which I read in October. I hadn’t thought I’d have a problem reading two books by the same author at the same time, since the stories were so different, but I have to admit that for a while I did find it a bit confusing since both Nettle and Bone and Paladin’s Strength feature a woman who has lived for years in a convent and is now traveling (and falling in love with) with a strong warrior. I didn’t enjoy Paladin’s Strength quite as much as the previous book – it didn’t seem to have quite as much humor, and it has a pretty high body count. But I am already reading the next book in the series and plan to read more by this author.

I had no idea what Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was about when I got it from the library, only that a friend had highly recommended it (she said if you love Fredrick Backman you will love this novel). I was thinking about “bright” in terms of color, as the book cover is quite colorful. The bright orange shape on the cover turned out to be an octopus, who turns out to be very bright as in intelligent. Marcellus has learned to understand English and even read it, and he also has figured out how to escape from his tank at the aquarium and go find food that he likes (people food from the breakroom and seafood from other tanks). He also is very observant and figures out something about the elderly woman who cleans the aquarium in the evening and the young man who works as her temporary replacement after she injures her ankle. It’s not hard to like 70-year-old Tova Sullivan, but it takes quite a while for 30-year-old Cameron to display his good qualities. The plot depends quite a bit on some coincidences, but it’s a very good story about relationships and grief and joy and what really matters in life (whether you’re a human or an octopus).

I finally finished The Confessions of St. Augustine, which I had downloaded as a free ebook and read a little of at a time, when I had to wait somewhere and didn’t have a printed book with me. It being a free ebook, I figured I’d put up with the archaic language (e.g. “thou knowest”), since I have no trouble reading the King James Version of the Bible. I don’t think it was the language, really, that bogged me down so much, but rather Augustine’s writing style. Some passages were perfectly clear, but there were others that I simply could not figure out what was the point he was making, even after reading through a sentence (which could go on for a whole paragraph sometimes) two or three times. And even when I could understand what he was getting at, sometimes I couldn’t see why it was worth writing about so extensively (e.g. what does it mean that the earth was formless before it was created). I had heard that this book was autobiographical, and certainly some parts were, but it was not nearly as much so as I had expected.

I picked A Bat in the Belfry by Sarah Graves because I was looking for another audiobook and a cozy mystery seemed like what I wanted at the time – entertaining and fairly undemanding. I had not realized it was part of a series, and from reading other reader reviews, I gather than the previous books in the series were better. It was an OK book, something to listen to while riding the exercise bike, but it didn’t make me want to go back and read earlier books in the series to see what I had missed.

I finished the month with a much better book. I had read a friend’s review of I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives, by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda, on goodreads.com and immediately checked the library’s website and put the book on hold. Since it is non-fiction, I had not expected it to be a quick read, but it was (though the fact that I read it during Thanksgiving break did make it easier to finish in a little over two days). Caitlin and Martin take turns telling their story of this unusual friendship that developed from a penpal project at school. As a young adult I lived about half an hour away from where Caitlin grew up, so I knew some of the places she wrote about. But I found it hard to relate to her interests in boys, clothes, and shopping – or how emotional she got about this penpal she had never met. I have never known poverty like Martin and his family, but I could relate more to his striving for high grades and his drive to get a good education. Since the book had been written to tell their story, it was pretty clear that it was going to have a good ending. But it was still gripping reading to see how it worked out. I googled Martin Ganda and was glad to see that he is both successful and working to help make life better for people in Africa.

Books I read in October 2023

One challenging prompt for the PopSugar Reading Challenge this year was “a book you bought from an independent bookstore,” simply because there isn’t one in town anymore, and I had to find one within reasonable driving distance. I suppose I could have ordered online, but for me the pleasure of a bookstore is browsing. I had no idea what book I wanted, but if I was going to buy a book, it needed to be something that I couldn’t simply get from the library, or that I wanted to own rather than just borrow. Generally that means non-fiction, because it’s something I’ll probably take longer to read, and want to be able to refer back to later.

I used the internet to find the store to begin with, Burlington by the Book, and also to get directions, then stopped there one day when I was on my way through Burlington. After much browsing I settled on The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean (my second choice would have been a different book by Sam Kean). I greatly enjoyed reading all sorts of interesting facts about DNA, about the various scientists who added to our understanding of genetics over the years, and about various unusual characteristics/behavior of people that are at least partly the result of DNA. I particularly enjoyed the later chapters that explain recent developments in the field. I had read some years ago about the growing understanding of how our genes do not, in many cases, determine how we will turn out so much as influence us in conjunction with various environmental factors, and Kean explained more about this emerging field of epigenetics.

Another challenging prompt was “a book about a forbidden romance,” in part because I don’t care for reading about romance in general. I looked through the discussion on Goodreads (there is a specifically for discussion of each of these prompts for the PopSugar Reading Challenge), and most of the books were either books I had read previously or that just did not appeal to me. One that did sound promising was Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher (whose book Thornhedge I had read in September), especially because the first reader review I saw on goodreads.com began “If you’re weary of fantasy starring super-hot, super-special eighteen-year-olds with improbably smooth banter skills, allow me to recommend these two awkward, well-meaning, damaged middle-aged people who are trying to patch together adequate lives and don’t deserve to be caught up in political intrigues and supernatural serial killings that have nothing to do with them.”

Unfortunately (in terms of the Reading Challenge) I did not think the romance in Paladin’s Grace really counted as forbidden. Stephen (the paladin) is afraid that he cannot be trusted, because he and his fellow paladins can go berserk – a useful ability in battle but rather dangerous off the battlefield, unless there is someone who can pull them out of it. That’s not the same as it being forbidden, however, and Stephen’s self-doubt, in the end, does not seem all that different from the self-doubt of a great many people who are afraid they are not good enough for the person they love. As it happens, Grace is plagued by a great deal of self-doubt herself, in her case largely the result of an emotionally abusive husband (from whom she had run away and whom she assumed had divorced her). I really enjoyed reading this book and am already started on the sequel.

One of the books I had considered for the forbidden romance prompt was Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I read some reader reviews on Goodreads and decided against it. But then the librarian at work recommended it at a book club meeting, so I decided to give it a try after all. Less than halfway through I concluded that I should have stuck to my disinclination to read it. I really don’t like reading smutty books, regardless of whether the sex is homosexual or heterosexual. Eventually the story got more focused on the conflicts with other people who disapprove of the relationship (or who fear those who will disapprove, since politics is very much involved), rather than so much on the two young men’s raging hormones. I think it oversimplifies a great many things, and like most romance books does not distinguish between love and being in love. But people don’t read romance books for realism. In the end I rated it 2.5 stars (out of 5) in my review on Goodreads.

Among books that were not for the Reading Challenge, by chance I started the month with two books (one in print, one audiobook) that both dealt with the theme of recovering what belongs to members of a culture but was taken from them by force or by theft. Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley deals with a teenage Native American determined to do whatever it takes (including breaking the law) to recover both bones and cultural artifacts of her ancestors that were taken by white people and displayed in museums (or sometimes simply stored in boxes while waiting to be catalogued) or put up for sale with no regard to who they rightfully belong to. I had very much liked Boulley’s previous novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter, though it had been long enough since I read that one that I had trouble remembering who the characters were that appear in both books. I didn’t enjoy the main character quite as much in this novel, but I was very interested in the discussion of issues related to NAGPRA (which I knew nothing of before reading this).

The second book was Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li, which is specifically about art, in this case objects taken from the Summer Palace in Beijing by European troops who destroyed the palace in 1860. A group of Chinese-American young adults, all children of immigrants, set out to steal these treasures back so they can be returned to China. The heists themselves strike me as unrealistic in how easy they are accomplished, but the characters are interesting, and the novel deals with important themes related to identity – especially for second-generation Americans, and with art and who gets to claim it.

With that in mind, I chose next to listen to an audiobook version of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel. I had heard how the Nazis had stolen art during WWII, especially from Jews, but I had no idea of the incredible scope of their thefts until reading this book, nor of the work accomplished by those whose mission during and after the war was to recover what the Nazis had stolen and restore these items to their rightful owners. It’s a very different kind of war story, involving people willing to risk their lives for people’s cultural heritage.

Another story of war, much more recent, was The Cat I Never Named : A True Story of Love, War, and Survival by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess with Laura L. Sullivan. I was aware of the Bosnian War when it was taking place, but I did not follow the news closely, being much more occupied with being a new mother and working on an MBA (as well as working full-time). Amra brings this history vividly to life as she tells her personal story of what it was like for her and her family during the war. She wonders why powerful countries like the U.S. don’t do more to protect her people from the Serbs, and I am reminded how difficult it is to determine when it is appropriate to intervene inside another country and how to get enough people to support such actions – a question very relevant with the wars going on in the world today and the controversy over what support to offer to whom.

I continued rereading the Mitford books by Jan Karon. A New Song is a bit different because it takes place away from Mitford, because Father Tim, now retired, has taken a position as interim priest on Whitecap Island. There’s a whole new cast of characters to get to know, but there’s also a lot going on back in Mitford and Tim finds it hard not to be there. I liked reading it, but decided when I finished it to take a break from the series for a while.

An online friend had recommended The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh so I decided to read it, despite having had mixed feelings about the previous book I had read by Walsh. As with the previous one, at the heart of this novel is some big secret that the main character is keeping, but in this book I thought it worked much better, because that was the whole point of the novel. Emma would like to tell her husband the truth about her past but is afraid it will destroy their relationship. Bit by bit, both the reader and her husband find out the truth about her past, and at the end even Emma finds out a surprising truth about her own past. It took a while for me to get into the story, but once I did it was engrossing.

I continued with the next book in Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway books with The Chalk Pit. As usual I found the solution to the mystery somewhat less than satisfying, but I enjoy the continued development of the characters and their relationships. I also found the history of the chalk mines and tunnels very interesting, and when I was done reading the book I had to go online to see actual pictures of the double-decker bus that fell in a sinkhole in Earlham Road in Norwich, back in 1988 (mentioned repeatedly in the novel, when a similar sinkhole appears).

I decided to read Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge simply because it was written by Spencer Quinn, whose Chet and Bernie books I have enjoyed so much. At the beginning, Mrs. Plansky is not a very interesting character, but after she learns she has been the victim of a Grandparent Scam and has lost nearly all her money, she decides to take matters into her own hands. It relies a lot on coincidence, but it’s lots of fun. Mrs. Plansky reminded me somewhat of Mrs. Pollifax in the series by Dorothy Gilman that I enjoyed so much a number of years ago. I don’t know whether Spencer Quinn plans to write more books about Mrs. Plansky, but if he does I’ll be happy to read them.

Books I read in September 2023

As I get down to the last several prompts in the PopSugar 2023 Reading Challenge, for most of these I have to make an effort to find books that match. But one was easy, and just required waiting for this season of the year to arrive. I downloaded Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher just because it sounded interesting, a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story (which filled another prompt that I had already done, but I like finding retellings of fairy tales). Then when I added the details to my list of books I’m reading I realized it was “a book that comes out in the second half of 2023.” It is a very different retelling of Sleeping Beauty, with the sleeping princess as the villain and the fairy who puts her and the castle under a spell as the very unlikely heroine. It’s a good story, imaginatively and well told, putting a very different perspective on a familiar tale.

I’ve continued reading the series of books by Elly Griffiths featuring archeologist Ruth Galloway. The Ghost Fields and The Woman in Blue recount some interesting history, recent in the case of The Ghost Fields (WWII) and much older in the case of The Woman in Blue (religious traditions going back to the Middle Ages), though rather little archeology. Familiar characters continue to be developed, which is probably one reason I keep on with the series, although I don’t find the mysteries that Ruth helps solve (or where she simply happens to be present at the solution) all that interesting in and of themselves.

I don’t remember where I saw Ghosted by Rosie Walsh suggested as a good book to read, but somehow it was on my TBR so I checked it out of the library. As the title suggests, using the (fairly) new sense of “ghost” as a verb, someone has suddenly stopped responding to calls, texts, or other attempts at contact. The reason why remains a mystery until fairly late in the book, and is connected to another mystery regarding a long-ago car accident. Walsh intentionally provides apparent clues regarding that accident which mislead the reader, and I didn’t feel that being mistaken and then finding out what really happened added to the story in any way. It seems to me that what made the story good could have been achieved just as well – if not better – without that. Other than that, it’s a good story about relationships and family and how important they are in our lives.

I came across a recommendation for the children’s book Urchin of the Riding Stars, by M.I. McAllister, in Christianity Today, so when I saw it at a secondhand bookstore I decided to buy it. It’s a reasonably good story, but I didn’t find it appealing like some children’s books that, even as an adult, I enjoy reading again, or like others that I have discovered only recently and want to read more in the series. Like many children’s books, the characters in this book are animals, but they neither act consistently like humans (as in many children’s books, not only wearing clothes but eating human food and using human technology) nor like animals (living in nature as animals live and only being like people in their ability to plan, reason, and talk). And the size difference between squirrels and otters makes it hard for me to see how the partnership between them would work very well. Maybe that’s being picky, but if characters are animals, they need to be animals for a reason – other than because books with animal characters are popular.

I read Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End by David Gibson both because it sounded like the kind of book I wanted to read and as a possible book for our adult Sunday School to read together. The group chose instead one of the books on Daniel that I had read in August, but I’m very glad I read this for myself because it’s an excellent book, one that I expect to pull out and look at parts of again even if I don’t reread the whole thing anytime soon. I had studied Ecclesiastes with a different adult Bible study group several years ago, but this book gave me a much better understanding not just of some of the imagery in Ecclesiastes but even more how it relates to our lives. It fit in with and built on what I had been focusing on earlier in the year regarding learning to recognize the many gifts in our lives every day, and learning to find joy more in the gift in each moment of our lives – however small they may be – than in expected pleasure or achievements in the future.

I don’t remember if I had The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty on my TBR list or if it just caught my fancy when I was looking for another audiobook, but it turned out to be a good choice. For a while I had trouble getting into the story – it was OK but at nearly 500 pages (I don’t remember how many hours but above average for the books I read/listen to) I was not looking forward to slogging through it if it didn’t get more interesting. Well, it did, and once the adventure really got going I really enjoyed it. It’s a fantasy set in a historical setting, which makes it sort of historical fiction, in a time and place (Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages) that were new to me. I really got to like it by the end and will be happy to read a sequel once there is one.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is the monthly selection for our local library book club. I thought when I started reading this book dealing with a global pandemic that it was inspired by the COVID pandemic, but it turns out Nagamatsu had started writing it years earlier. It is global warming that is the the real killer in this novel, with the pandemic just one way it kills (by thawing out the permafrost and freeing microbes previously trapped far below the frozen surface). It is actually a number of separate but interconnected stories, some very moving but a few less so. It explores how people deal with impending death, with grief, with families and whole communities torn apart by so many losses, and how to find a way forward in the midst of it all.

I picked Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin as somewhat of a break from the darkness of Nagamatsu’s book. Since it deals with life under Stalin, it also deals with difficult themes (injustice, powerlessness, dealing with loss of faith in authority and in one’s future), but it’s a children’s book so it is somewhat less emotionally wrenching. I have no idea how I would have responded to it as a child, of course. As an adult I could appreciate the lessons it teaches, both in terms of history and how people relate to each other.

I needed another audiobook to listen to while driving home from a conference in Kansas city, so I was happy to find that The Space Between by Diana Gabaldon would just about fit in the hours it would take to make the trip. It is one of several books that fits in between books in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, though it’s been long enough since I read most of the series that I had trouble remembering how some of the characters were. It was very interesting and enjoyable listening, however.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey had been on my TBR list for a while, perhaps since the last time that the PopSugar Reading Challenge included the prompt “a book published the year you were born.” I had already used another book for that prompt this year, but I decided I’d finally read this book I’d heard about for so long. I knew it wouldn’t be a fun book to read because it deals with difficult themes, and I certainly wasn’t wrong there. For most of the book I had to push myself to keep reading, then near the end I really got caught up in the story, only to have it end the way it does. For a book on the injustice and cruelty of mental hospitals in that era, it’s no doubt an eye-opener. But for a book that deals with issues of individualism and conformity, I’m not sure I’d want to recommend one that leaves me feeling so sad.

Books I read in August 2023

One of the more challenging prompts in the PopSugar 2023 Reading Challenge, at least for me, was “a #BookTok recommendation,” simply because I have no intention of using BookTok myself so I had to find lists online of BookTok recommendations. A good number of them were books I had already read, and others did not sound appealing. But She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan sounded pretty interesting. I like historical fiction (it was the seventh book so far this year that fit the historical fiction prompt), and I knew very little about the history of China. It was an interesting read but somewhat confusing, with so many characters and shifting alliances. Also, while I initially found the main character’s actions believable at the beginning – she was doing whatever she had to in order to survive, as the book progressed I didn’t find her fixation on her fate (to be “great,” based on a prophecy made to her brother, whose identity she assumed after his death) and her willingness to sacrifice others seemed to be imposed on her character rather than springing from it.

It was very easy, in contrast, to select “a book published in spring 2023,” once I saw that In the Lives of Puppets by T. J. Klune was available at the library. I had no idea what it was about, but I had enjoyed The House in the Cerulean Sea when I read it last year so I was happy to check out Klune’s latest book. It is very different from that other novel, but quite as fascinating in its own way. It’s a dystopian novel, where robots have wiped out humans in order to make the world a better place, but the robots have developed some pretty human characteristics, and one of them decides to secretly “grow” a human fetus (it wasn’t clear to me where he got the raw materials to do so) and raise the boy as his son. I didn’t find it as engrossing as the previous novel I had read by Klune, but thought-provoking at times and a well-told story.

Since I have been rereading the Mitford books by Jan Karon, it was easy enough to check off “a book you bought secondhand” when I finished These High, Green Hills (it also fits for “a book you read more than 10 years ago,” as do all the other books in the original series). Then I went on to reread Out to Canaan. Both are enjoyable, though not especially memorable – basically the entire series is one long story, and each book is simply a bunch of chapters in the story, so it’s hard to remember what was in each separate book. They make good bedtime reading, and I’ll no doubt continue with rereading the whole series.

Sometimes, though, I take a break from the Mitford books and read children’s books at bedtime (and unlike when I read books at bedtime as a child, I find it fairly easy to put the book down each night after one chapter, or once in a great while two). The one I read in August was The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall. I don’t remember where I heard about it or who recommended it, but I found it very enjoyable and plan on reading more of the series. At first I wondered how I would keep track of which sister was which, but each quickly was developed as a distinct personality, and I enjoyed reading about their adventures.

I’m also not sure who recommended Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger, but I’m very glad whoever it was did, because it’s an excellent book, possibly the best I’ve read this year. It tells about one summer in the life of a boy whose father is a Methodist minister, when several deaths took place in town and how they changed him and his family and other people in town. There’s some mystery involved, but that’s not the focus of the book. There is a brief sermon, given by the boy’s father, that is so good that I copied it down, but – unlike some books with Christian messages – it doesn’t feel like the book was written so that he could give that sermon. It’s a book about grace, just as the title says, the ordinary grace that we experience in ordinary life, in the middle of all the joys and pains and grief and anger and sometimes even boredom of life. It’s about family and relationships and how people hurt each other and how people – sometimes – forgive each other. It’s about how God works in our lives in ways that are often hard to notice, including through reading wonderful novels like this one.

Another book that I enjoyed a great deal, in a very different way, was Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. I think I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Sanderson, but this was probably the best so far. It’s been described as as good for fans of The Princess Bride – personally I like it far better than that book, and better than the movie as well. (In this case it’s a girl who goes to rescue the prince because she loves him, rather than a boy who goes to rescue the princess because he loves her. There’s also a talking rat, pirates, and a dragon.) There’s a lot of whimsy in the book, and it was just so much fun to read, not just for the story but how Sanderson tells it. I don’t often feel an urge to read quotes from a book I’m reading, but twice I had to go read a few lines to my husband because I liked them so much. Sometimes they were just fun, but there were also some moderately profound lines here and there about bravery, memory, character, and other truths about life. (One line that I remember was something about how anxiety is an infinitely renewable resource.) Another thing I like is that Sanderson has such a knack of creating seemingly impossible circumstances for his characters to deal with, and then finding ways to resolve those problems in a way you wouldn’t have thought of but that absolutely make sense once you see it (unlike so many books where the solutions feel forced in order to make the plot work).

Having taken a day to visit Nauvoo at the end of July, I was curious to learn more about Joseph Smith and his life – including the parts not mentioned by the missionaries at Nauvoo, like his running for president of the United States. I wasn’t so interested that I wanted to tackle a typical biography, but when I saw that there was a graphic novel about his life, I decided that was a good way to learn more. So I read Joseph Smith and the Mormons by Noah Van Sciver, and from what I read in other readers’ reviews, it is a good treatment of Smith’s life, presenting what people said and did rather than trying to interpret things in favor of or against Smith. I admit I still find it strange that so many people were attracted to the church Smith founded, but from what I read (in online articles), it fit with other things that were going on in the religious climate of the time.

I also read another book on history, from a couple of decades after Smith’s death. For years I had seen Bill O’Reilly’s books Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Patton, etc. I have never been a fan of O’Reilly, and I had no particular interest in learning more about any of those deaths. But I was somewhat curious to see what people had liked so much about Killing Lincoln that O’Reilly had been able to turn it into a series of sorts. So I listened to the audiobook version of Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, which happens to be narrated by O’Reilly himself (I don’t care for his narration style either, but I try to focus on the book itself rather than the narrator). I did learn some fascinating history about the end of the Civil War, which I had not known before. I also had not realized that the killing of Lincoln was a conspiracy which was to have killed two other men as well at the same time, but I was less interested in all those details. I also would just as soon have it presented as straight history, rather than trying to make it sound suspenseful like a mystery novel, full of what people felt and even said that could very well have been the case but we don’t actually know and I prefer to stick to what we do know rather than indulging in imagining what they might have felt and said.

I do enjoy mystery novels, however, at least some of them. One author I have been enjoying lately is Elly Griffiths, and in August I read The Outcast Dead. It deals with issues of adults not taking proper care of children, either their own children or those they are responsible for caring for, both in the present and past. As always with the Ruth Galloway books, there is archeology and history involved, as well as Ruth’s complicated relationship with her daughter’s father. In addition, a friend’s child is kidnapped. Considering what happened in the previous book in the series, I was fully expecting Ruth’s own daughter to be kidnapped, and it was a relief that for once there was no direct threat to Ruth or Kate.

Our adult Sunday School class has been off for the summer, and when we start up again in September we need to choose a book to read. One that my husband read while preparing for a sermon series and possibly a Bible study in conjunction with the series, and asked me to see if I thought it would work for the adult Sunday School also, was The Mystery of the Holy Spirit by R. C. Sproul. We were both somewhat surprised, in a book with that title, how much of it focuses not on the Holy Spirit but on the Trinity (the first four chapters) or on Christ (the last chapter). It makes sense, in a way, since the focus of the New Testament is certainly on Christ and not the Holy Spirit. There is plenty of good teaching in the book, particularly providing counterarguments to some claims that are made about the Holy Spirit and His work. But on the whole I did not find it the kind of book that I thought would foster productive discussions in our group. (Our groups is much more oriented to groups discussion and sharing than one person teaching the others.)

I was much more excited reading two books on the book of Daniel, Hearing the Message of Daniel: Sustaining Faith in Today’s World by Christopher J.H. Wright and Brave by Faith: God-Sized Confidence in a Post-Christian World by Alistair Begg. A lot of studies on Daniel focus on the prophecies in the later chapters and try to identify what people/nations/events the prophecies points to and what they might tell us about what is happening in the world today. I have little interest in that so I was pleased to see that both of these books focus on what it means to live as a believer in the God of the Bible in the midst of a culture that has very different values and priorities. I especially enjoyed Wright’s book, which is longer and goes into more depth in a number of areas, including suggesting alternative interpretations of certain things, such as why Daniel and his friends refused to eat the king’s food, or what kingdoms are pointed to in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Unfortunately, neither book includes discussion questions, which our group usually uses to guide our discussions of the books we read.

Just for something completely different, I picked out The Cinco de Mayo Murder by Lee Harris. I initially thought I could read it for the prompt “a book about a holiday that’s not Christmas” (every book in the series is connected to a holiday, but this is the only one available through my library). But despite the title, there is really very little about Cinco do Mayo beyond a very brief description of what the holiday is about, and the plot has nothing to do with it other than the date of someone’s death (that the main character is investigating, twenty years later). If the library had any more in the series, I’d try another one, but I’m not going to go out and buy one.

Another book that could also be described as “very different” is When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. It could have fit the prompt “a book that fulfills your favorite prompt from a past challenge,” which for me is always a book about time travel. But unlike most time travel books, in this one the main character is not the one doing the time travel. In fact, we never actually see time travel taking place. It is only at the end that the main character figures out what has been happening (though the reader gets hints that is what is going on, just not who it is). It is set during the 1970’s, and includes a contestant in the $20,000 Pyramid, which I enjoyed watching when I was growing up. But mostly it is about relationships with friends and family, and how often we misjudge people, and how our lives are enriched by them when we give them and ourselves a chance to have better relationships.

Books I read in July 2023

I had thought that I would just kind of happen upon “a book about a vacation” without deliberately looking for one, but I finally starting looking through lists of suggested books. I wasn’t all that keen on reading Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, since there is clearly romance involved, but it has good enough reviews – and is so clearly one of the best fits for the prompt – that I decided to read it anyway. And it’s great.

I had a few different ideas for “a modern retelling of a classic,” and I will probably read at least one of the others, but I settled on Atalanta by Jennifer Saint both because I like retellings of Greek myths (and unlike Stephen Fry’s book that I read in May, it is not just retelling familiar stories but making up a new one using familiar characters and adventures) and because it was available in the library when I was looking for it. (It is also “a book published in spring 2023” and is still shelved under New Books.) I did not remember anything about Atalanta from previous books I have read, and very little about the Argonauts, so it was interesting in that regard – including how it is explained why she is not generally associated with the Argonauts. But I have to admit that I didn’t find her as compelling a character as I had hoped. I can’t say what was missing, just that something was. I don’t have to care about a character to appreciate a book, but it certainly makes reading the book more enjoyable when I do.

I had thought Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton might be a retelling of Macbeth (based on the title and something on the inside flap describing the novel as Shakespearean), but it turns out that it borrows more from Macbeth in terms of themes (ambition, betrayal) than characters or plot. I found it on the whole not all that interesting, having to push myself to keep going until fairly near the end when it finally pulled me in and I had to see how it all ended. In keeping with the Shakespearean connection, it is a tragedy, ending badly for all the major characters. It was one of those books that made more sense once I read reviews of it, and could see what it says about how our choices shape our lives, often in ways we never expected, and often in ways that we find ourselves unable to change because we can’t go back and undo what we have done.

A much more entertaining book was Sal and Gabi Break the Universe. Besides the PopSugar Reading Challenge, I am also doing the college library’s summer reading challenge, which includes a Bingo card with different categories of books to read. One of these was ebook, and while I generally much prefer to read printed books, it is handy to have a book I can pull out of my purse at any time (without having a purse big enough to easily hold books, as I had in middle school – that being before the days of backpacks to carry books in). I had looked for Rick Riordan Presents books in Libby, and had listened to the audiobooks that were available. But now looking for ebooks I found this book by Carlos Hernandez. Unlike other Rick Riordan Presents books, it doesn’t have supernatural characters, but it does have Cuban folklore, and the supernatural aspect of it is crossing between parallel universes. I liked that unusual combination, and the characters of Sal and Gabi made it a very entertaining book – with some positive messages about family and friends and finding joy in the midst of challenges.

Our library book club selection was The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other books I had read by Tevis, in part because it didn’t seem to really get all that much into the character of this man who came to Earth from another planet, hoping to build a spaceship to rescue the rest of the people from their dying planet. It’s moderately interesting, though ultimately a bit depressing. It does make one wonder, how would people react, if we found a person from another planet? Is it inevitable that mutual distrust and fundamental differences between humans and non-humans would lead to the sort of ending Tevis described?

Having reread and enjoyed Jan Karon’s At Home in Mitford, I continued the series with A Light in the Window. I had forgotten many of the details of how Timothy and Cynthia’s relationship developed, and as before it was a relief when Timothy finally made up his mind. There are lots of other details I had forgotten, so it’s nearly as interesting to reread as it was to read the first time, even if I do know how the major issues will play out.

One audiobook I had more than once considered, when choosing my next book to listen to, was Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s only about four hours, and with my daily commute I’m really not in a hurry, but it worked when looking for a book to listen to while my husband and younger son and I were driving across Iowa to visit our older son in his new home. We all take an interest in science, though I wondered if the book would be too basic for our son, who is a graduate student in physics. He didn’t seem overly bored with it, however, and he could answer our questions on certain points Tyson made.

One audiobook that did take quite a few days of commuting to finish was The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. I had seen it on the list of books recommended by people at the college library book club (another category on the bingo sheet), and I had enjoyed the previous book I had listened to by Grann. Like the previous book, about the Osage Indians, it often went into far more detail than I really cared about, but I learned a lot about sailing ships in the eighteenth century, what it was like to serve in the British navy, how a few of the sailors were able to survive their ordeal, and how the navy handled the contradictory stories of the survivors. Since one of the things that leaves me dissatisfied with some novels is the thought that “it wouldn’t really happen that way, that’s just how the author chose to write it to suit the plot,” reading history is sometimes a welcome change, because as unlikely as some things sound, history tells us they really did happen.

A very different kind of non-fiction was How Do We Know?: An Introduction to Epistemology by James K. Dew Jr. and Mark W. Foreman. I would have liked to take a class in epistemology in college, but it didn’t fit in my schedule. No doubt a college course would have covered far more than this introductory book, but it gave a very good introduction, and if I want to read more on certain topics I have a better basis for doing so, as well as a list of recommended books.

Since I had enjoyed the ebook I read by Carlos Hernandez, and there weren’t any more available through Libby in Rick Riordan Presents, I found instead an ebook that is the next in a series I have been reading, on and off, by Elly Griffiths. I had tentatively planned to read A Dying Fall last fall, then didn’t, but I enjoyed it very much reading it this month, pulling it out whenever I was away from home (and away from printed books) and had time when I was waiting for something (at the gas station, at a concert, waiting in line, etc.). This book happened to feature King Arthur, which is a subject I have long had an interest in. And it continues the interesting story of Ruth the archeologist and her relationships with the detective inspector who is the father of her daughter as well as with the druid Cathbad who is her daughter’s godfather.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion was another book recommended by the college library book club (a group that meets once a month, not to discuss any particular book but whatever people have been reading), and it looked like it would be fun reading. It was, though I don’t know if it does as good a job of portraying the life of someone with Asperger’s as some other books I have read. It’s an enjoyable story, though, and you can hardly help rooting for Don to succeed.

The title Grace Defined and Defended: What a 400-Year-Old Confession Teaches Us about Sin, Salvation, and the Sovereignty of God might suggest to some that it would be a dense and dull theology book. I suppose it would appear dense to someone with little interest in the subject, but it is short enough not to feel like heavy reading, and Kevin DeYoung does a good job of explaining concepts in a way that never feels dull. I had no particular interest in the Canons of Dort prior to reading it – I couldn’t have said what they were about, but I was interested in understanding more about grace as understood by Reformed theology. DeYoung does a better job of explaining the points of TULIP than I have seen before, going into enough detail to make points that had not been clear to me before but not so much detail that I got lost in it (in fact, I finished the 144-page book in one afternoon). I’m still not sure of my own position on some of these points, but I understand the thinking behind TULIP better.

For the banned or challenged book, I chose Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. I recognized the title as being one commonly assigned in school (while reading it I remembered that my younger son had read it for school and had told me what it was about, but that was long enough ago I had forgotten it all), but had no idea why it would be banned or challenged. After finishing it, I read an article describing some of these challenges. I find it hard to understand the challenges based the claim that it promotes witchcraft – the children address prayers to unnamed “Spirits” in their mythical kingdom, which hardly qualifies as witchcraft in my opinion. I can see some parents would be bothered by the main characters’ negative reaction to the belief that anyone who doesn’t believe the Bible will go to hell, but I disagree with it myself (faith in Christ may usually go along with belief in the Bible but it’s not the same thing), and I would much rather expose children to a variety of viewpoints and discuss with them why we agree or disagree with certain ideas, rather than limit them to a small number of books that promote orthodox Christian beliefs.

I read some reader reviews on goodreads.com that argued that the problem with the book is more in how it handles the death of a main character. I doubt there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with it (though certainly some ways may be better than others). What the book provides is an opportunity to consider the idea, recognize the different ways that people do respond to death, and have an opportunity to talk about it when dealing with a fictional character before it happens in a child’s own life. Personally I didn’t find this book as moving as many readers do. Maybe it’s in part because it’s a book for children and I’m in my 60’s, but I finished another book the next day (a memoir written for children as a graphic novel), and that one did get me a bit choked up toward the end.

That book was When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, and I read it as another graphic novel for the library reading challenge. It is Omar Mohamed’s story, about growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya after having to flee his village in Somalia after armed men came and started killing everyone. Omar takes care of his younger brother Hassan, who has some kind of disability and only ever says the word “hooyo.” Their mother promised she would find them, but many years go by and she does not come. It tells of the difficulties in getting an education, particularly for girls, and of the hopes and fears associated with the possibility of getting approved by the UN to go to America or Canada. And of course the challenge of day-to-day life with very few jobs, very little to eat, and scant prospects of anything changing. Omar is helped by a social worker, and it becomes his goal to be able to someday help refugees himself. Now living in the U.S., he founded Refugee Strong, which works to help students in refugee camps get an education.

The last square to fill in on the Bingo card was “a biography or memoir of someone that interests you.” Since I had read a couple of books by Stephen Fry and especially enjoyed one of them, and also saw that he is a “comedian, writer, actor, humourist, novelist, poet, columnist, filmmaker, television personality and technophile,” when I saw that he had written an biography I was interested, and especially intrigued by the title. Anyone who would name his biography Moab Is My Washpot sounded interesting. What I had not expected was that it would only be about the first twenty years of his life, before he became all those things – at least in terms of being an adult making a living. He certainly did some writing as an adolescent (most of which he spares us, as he puts it), and acted as a class comedian a good deal of the time, and certainly was putting on an act a great deal of the time. But I really wasn’t interested in all the trouble he got into as a boy, except as background for what he did later.

History along the Mississippi

When I was growing up, my father had a membership at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. I don’t know just how often he took us there, but I always enjoyed it, especially visiting the shops of the blacksmith, the potter, and the pewtersmith. As a child I was probably most interested in the process, seeing how iron or clay or molten pewter could turn into horseshoes, pitchers, or spoons. (And in the case of the potter and pewtersmith, how an imperfect product could easily be collapsed back into the raw material and the process started over.)

As an adult, I’m more interested in seeing how people used to live, and how everyday objects could be made with the limited materials and tools available. When I was looking for a place to go for a day or two, I settled on Nauvoo after discovering that the district known as Old Nauvoo had various shops you could visit and learn about their various trades, as well as being the site of significant events for those with an interest in religious history.

I knew a little of the history of Nauvoo from reading historical fiction, but I remembered few details and had no idea just how accurate those were anyway. I didn’t have a particularly strong interest in learning more about Joseph Smith and the religious organization he founded (commonly called the Mormon church but they refer to it as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but I had enough curiosity to learn more about it to want to see their free production of “Remembering Joseph” at the Historic Nauvoo Visitors’ Center before beginning to explore Old Nauvoo.

I would guess that the majority of the audience were Latter Day Saints, though I suppose there must be other people like me who go there out of curiosity and for the history. Certainly in the shops in Old Nauvoo and at the Carthage jail the next day, the rest of the people seemed to be family groups, many (most?) of them repeat visitors. Once I was asked by one of the missionaries whether I was a member of the Church, but no one made any effort to engage me in any discussion about my religious views. I thought a couple times of asking, when they spoke of people receiving the “restored Gospel of Jesus Christ,” what was wrong with the one preached before Joseph Smith. But it did not seem to be the time or place to get into that.

I was somewhat disappointed that in most of the shops, nothing was actually being made (as at Old Sturbridge Village, where you could actually buy the products in the gift shop). But you can learn a lot just from seeing examples of products in various stages of completion, with explanations of the work to get from one step to the next. I enjoyed seeing how to make a tin pan, shoes, bricks, a rifle, and wagon wheels. At the print shop I not only saw how a newspaper was produced using movable type but also heard the origin of words and phrases such as upper- and lowercase (from the position of the cases holding these letters) and “minding your p’s and q’s” (which were next to each other in the case and could easily be mixed up since they were mirror images of each other).

At each shop, the missionaries (always two of them, who took turns explaining things) also told about the people who had owned and worked in these businesses, usually including how they had come to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and how they had shown their faith in how they lived, and sometimes in something they had written (such as a letter or diary). Always the portraits they provided of these long-ago Saints were of exemplary faith and behavior. I couldn’t help wondering, did they pick and choose from the stories that could have been told to find only those that showed these people in the best light, or did they only choose to restore buildings that had been the property of the saintliest Saints?

One shop I particularly enjoyed was the Webb Brothers Blacksmith & Wainwright Shop. In the blacksmith side, we were shown how horseshoes were made (though the one he made seemed to be a scaled down model of one, a memento for a tourist to take home rather than a practical shoe that could go on a horse’s hoof). He also explained why not only the horses but also the oxen needed shoes (I had never heard of ox shoes before). But what I found even more interesting was the wainwright side of the shop, where he showed how the large wagon wheels were made, why the rear wheels were larger than the front wheels, and other features of the wagons that were made by the thousands for the planned exodus to the West.

Leaving the wainwright’s shop, I followed the Trail of Hope down to the bank of the Mississippi, reading the signs posted at intervals with words written by people who had left Nauvoo, telling about their experiences of suffering and loss. I may not understand or agree with their religious beliefs, but they certainly showed dedication to and faith in their Church and their leaders as they left nearly everything behind and headed out into unknown dangers.

Reaching the river, I was distracted from serious thoughts about history by seeing a huge area of lilies and lily pads along the river bank. (The next day, driving home on the other side of the river, I saw expanses of lily pads there were if anything even larger.) I’ve seen lily pads before, but in ponds, not rivers, and I’m not sure I had ever seen such big ones as these. I’m curious what makes them proliferate in certain places along the river and not others, but so far I haven’t found anything much about it in my online searches.

My last stop in Old Nauvoo was the Lyon Home and Drug and Variety Store. I remember the General Store at Old Sturbridge Village, so it wasn’t too surprising to see a store that sold baskets, barrels, fabric, dishes, and other household items. But I was somewhat surprised that this was also the drug store. (Though now that I think about it, I remember buying school supplies at the drug store when I was growing up, as well as wishing I had money to buy some decorative items such as a really pretty flower pot that I admired every time I was there.)

I was interested to learn that many of the herbs sold there came from the garden outside, so I wandered out there for a while, but unfortunately none of the plants are labeled. I thought this one might be some kind of pepper (I remembered hearing the missionary mention capsicum), but my iPhone plant identifier guesses either groundcherry or squash.

I don’t think it looks like squash, but I did find gourds elsewhere in the garden. There was a trellis of some kind in the back, and I walked up to it to see what was inside, and was surprised to see a number of large green objects hanging from the top and sides. Looking more closely I realized they were gourds, and I wondered why they were hung there. Then I looked even closer, and realized there were growing there. I don’t know what use they would have in the drug store, but they were pretty cool to look at.

When I had looked for a place to stay the night, the place with the best reviews – within my limited budget – happened to be in Carthage, which is where Joseph Smith died while being held in the Carthage Jail. I hadn’t initially been all that interested in visiting the jail, but after listening to a number of presentations by LDS missionaries in Nauvoo and learning lots of interesting history, I decided to do the tour of the jail the next morning.

After I got home that night, I looked up a bit of history on the conflicts that led up to the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram. I couldn’t help but notice how the accounts of the missionaries had left out any details of why Smith had been accused of treason or why the mob gathered outside the jail, other than that they hated Smith and wanted to get rid of him and drive out the Latter Day Saints. I wonder if the missionaries are taught a version of history that also leaves out anything that would explain – which does not mean justify – the behavior of those who killed Smith.

The internet is of course full of unreliable information, and even published books are hardly guaranteed to be accurate. But this article puts the matter into some perspective. No doubt fear and prejudice of people with what would have been considered heretical theology (here is a comparison of LDS and traditional Christian views), but political power was also very significant.

We know from far more recent history that justice is sometimes subverted by political power of one kind or another. While it does not excuse the crime of those who broke into the jail and killed the Smith brothers, it helps to explain their motivation, fearing that this man who had such power over a whole city (and aspired to much higher office) would again be able to escape punishment, this time for what was labeled treason (he had declared martial law within the city – and he was commander-in-chief of the city militia, so he could enforce it – setting himself and his followers as a law unto themselves).

Another thing I don’t remember the missionaries mentioning at all was that at the time of his death, Joseph Smith was running for president of the United States. Historians disagree as to whether he was a serious candidate or just doing it to bring attention to certain issues. He made it clear that as president he would make sweeping changes – some of which were made within a couple of decades, and some people credit him with having contributed to those changes by having campaigned for them.

Back to my trip – from Carthage I headed across the river to Keokuk, where I visited the George M. Verity River Museum. I like museums in general, and I was intrigued at the idea of a museum inside a paddleboat. Actually, it’s more that the (now landbound) paddleboat is the museum. I knew next to nothing about how paddle boats operated, and I very much enjoyed the tour, hearing the history of the George M. Verity and seeing how it operated back when it went up and down the river.

My final stop before heading home was also in Keokuk, the Keokuk National Cemetery. I don’t have any relatives buried there (as far as I know, but there are no doubt some people there that I’m distantly related to, if you go back enough generations to a common ancestor), but it is a peaceful place to visit, very different from the other historical sites I had seen on my trip.