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Fight Night

by Miriam Toews, 2021

This is the 2nd book selection for the Old Town Library Book Club 2025-2026. It was very different, very funny in spots, a wonderment, sometimes irritating, but touching and beautiful. The story takes place in Toronto. There are 4 main characters: Grandma, Mom, Swiv, and Gord. Swiv is 9 years old, very precocious, maybe a genius. She has been suspended from school for fighting and is at home taking care of her beloved Grandma, who takes a billion pills, has heart problems, is in danger of dying at any moment, but is full of love and fun and strength for Swiv and her Mom (and Gord). Mom is an actress who is pregnant. They call the baby, Gord. They don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but Gord is a powerful being. Mom is forgoing her bad habits to keep Gord healthy, and is pretty much insane most of the time; sometimes very angry (“Scorched Earth”) but almost always over-the-top emotional. Grandma and Swiv and Mom are very excited for Gord to be born.

The book is told by Swiv; it is her stream of conscious through 251 pages. She is FUNNY but neurotic. She is responsible for Grandma, she thinks, and she thinks her Mom is insane. She and Grandma are a team. Swiv takes care of making sure Grandma takes her billions of pills correctly, picks them up off the floor, along with Grandma’s hearing aids. Swiv helps Grandma take a shower. Swiv helps Grandma boil her conchigliettes (little shell macaroni).

Grandma and Swiv have a bond between them. They go through their days together while pregnant Mom is away at rehearsal. They start the day with Editorial Meetings. Then Math class and Swiv is able to immediately answer the most complex Math problems. Each and every part of the day is an adventure together. Grandma is an amazing woman – one of about 15 children, a very hard life, but so full of love and joy for everyone. She loves people and makes friends with everyone she meets. Swiv doesn’t know what to think but she goes along and watches closely and narrates every adventure they have through her 9 year-old genius eyes. Towards the middle of the book, Grandma decides she needs to go to California to see her beloved nephews, Lou and Ken, who live in Fresno. Swiv goes with her. It’s a harrowing, grand, eye-opening adventure for Swiv, with some beautiful, poignant moments for Grandma. Grandma ends up getting hurt in California. She and Swiv go to a nursing home to visit some of her old friends. Grandma does a kick while dancing for some old guys in the nursing home and falls and breaks her arm and loses a tooth. She refuses to go to an American hospital because it will bankrupt her daughter and Swiv. She and Swiv fly home, another harrowing adventure. Grandma goes straight to a hospital in Toronto. She is failing. Swiv and Mom are there, and Mom goes into labor. Gord is born in the maternity ward while Grandma is in ICU. Swiv takes baby Gord from atop her sleeping mother, and puts her in her backpack and takes her to see Grandma in the ICU and shows her to Grandma. Grandma opens her eyes and sees baby Gord. Then Mom shows up frantic for Gord and sees Swiv and her infant sister with Grandma. What a touching scene. What a beautiful ending. Grandma dies and Swiv and Mom and Gord (who is named Elvira after Grandma) are together with her to the end. Beautiful!

(more…) “Fight Night”

Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America

Mike Yankoski, 2005

An excellent book on homelessness, recommended in the packet of materials Wayne got from Harvest Farm. As a young man, Mike Yankoski decided to show his faith by living as a homeless man for 5 months. He and Sam, a volunteer who became a good friend, stayed about a month each in Colorado (Mike at the Denver Rescue Mission, Sam at Harvest Farm), then Washington D.C., then Portland, Oregon; then Phoenix, then San Diego.

Mike writes about his experiences. There is a lot of fear at first, a lot of discomfort. The homeless are by and large mentally ill or addicted or both. The ones with schizophrenia are the worst. You cannot really communicate with them. You can only pray for them, help them with momentary physical needs (food or water or clothing). They are a minority, though. He describes a man in San Francisco, Henry, who, as soon as he wandered into the park, every dog started barking and lunging for him. “As soon as his foot stepped into the park, every dog in the courtyard began barking viciously, ears back, hair raised, fangs bared…I am not comfortable saying that Henry was demon possessed. I don’t know. I will say that the experiences surrounding him were some of the most challenging for me to deal with or explain. How did every dog in the park sense his presence? Why were his actions so uncontrolled and erratic?…But here’s the thing: Jesus expects us to reach out to Henrys, too–and He draws the expectation in the clearest of terms. How we treat people in this life will determine whether we hear “whatever you did for one of the least of these…you did for me” (Matthew 25:40) or “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matthew 25:45, emphasis added).”

The very worst thing he ran into, though, was the hypocrisy of the Church. One church in Portland, Oregon, had a gate with a padlock and a sign on the front doors, ‘No trespassing. Church Business Only.’ It disgusted him.

He was amazed at how many people ignored him. That’s what I do, ignore the homeless. As usual, what Wayne does is the most loving – smiles, acknowledges them, sometimes helps with a bit of food or a soda pop. That’s what meant a lot to Mike and Sam. He doesn’t recommend giving homeless people money – in most cases, it will go for drugs and alcohol. “Unfortunately, it’s also true that the majority of the men and women we knew on the streets would-within a half hour of receiving a donation-spend it entirely on drugs or alcohol…That’s why I recommend you give something other than cash. For example, gift certificates to fast-food restaurants make a good alternative….Having said that, I think the most meaningful gift might be your genuine attention and caring. It was amazing how much a smile or quick hello did for Sam and me on the streets, partly because such kindnesses were so rare. When someone stopped to talk, even for a minute, the powerful underlying message was, “I notice you, you’re a human being, and you’re worth my time.””

Here’s what he recommends:

  1. Find the rescue mission nearest to you. Call and find out how you can get involved. Show up an hour early and plan on leaving an hour after you’re scheduled to. Have conversations with the homeless as they stand outside, waiting to get in. Bring bottled water, baked cookies, granola bars, patience, and a sense of humor. You’ll bless those who cannot bless you in return.
  2. Go downtown with a friend or friends (don’t go alone). Buy cups of coffee or a bag of take-out food, find a homeless person sitting around asking for money, share your gifts, and enjoy a conversation. No agenda, no plans, no purpose other than to be with that person. You’ll be amazed at what unfolds.
  3. Is it cold outside? Go to your closet and grab the sweater, sweatshirt, or coat you keep telling yourself you’ll wear sometime but know you won’t. Call up four friends and tell them to do the same thing. Then go downtown and hand out your warm clothing to the men or women huddled under the overpass or in a doorway. As you stand there thinking of how cold your nose is, you’ll be amazed at the genuine thankfulness of someone whose whole boy is probably numb. And your giving will warm your soul, too.
  4. Become a spokesperson in your youth group, church, and community for those who have no voice. Be relentlessly suspicious of our comfortable life, and of the comfort zones that render so many Christian fellowships insensitive and ineffective in our communities. God calls us all to more. And you and I can lead the way, one small step at a time.

Yes, if every church in Fort Collins was open during the week (daytime for all, nighttime for some), for a place the homeless could go and get relief – bathrooms, showers, food, water, clean their clothes, maybe – what a plethora of help and love of God flowing to the least of these. This book really convicted me.

(more…) “Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America”

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

by Kirsten Miller, 2024

This is the first selection for the Old Town Library Book Club for 2025-2026, and the Fort Collins Reads Headliner for 2025. It was an easy read, about a fictional southern town, Troy, Georgia, filled with good people and bad people. One of the bad people is Lula Dean, an ignorant, petty, jealous, hypocritical, self-righteous, bitter white woman, who decides heads up the Concerned Parent Committee and bans a bunch of books. She then puts up a little free library in her front yard full of mostly putrid books, like The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe!, 101 Cakes to Bake for Your Family, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Art of the Deal, Manhood, Our Confederate Heroes, The Art of Crochet, Contract with America, A Caledonian Fling, The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. (Some of those books are made-up.) The lesbian daughter, Lindsay, of one of the towns most respected woman, Beverly Underwood, switches out the books with banned books, leaving the covers intact. As the town takes books from Lula Dean’s Little Free Library, they become educated to their own prejudices and self-righteousness. Some of the books she puts inside the jackets are banned books and some are made up: All Women are Witches: Find Your Power and Put It to Use, Beloved, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, The Hemingses of Monticello, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Gender Queer, Humankind.

Every type of ignorance in America today is reflected in many of the people living in this town. There are Nazis, the ugliest type of ignorance–murderous, evil racists. There are those who believe women are meant to serve. Those who believe the Confederates were heroes. Those who believe our slavery was a kind of benevolence towards black people. Those who are anti-gay and afraid. Those who have been brainwashed by media. They are self-righteous, hypocritical, judgmental, holier than thou, ignorant. The good guys are educated, open-minded, sane; some are queer, one becomes a witch (goddess), and some are just regular folks. Lots and lots of characters.

In the end, the Nazis are either dead or run off in shame. The ones who had prejudices and were swayed by misinformation become educated and more open-minded. Because of DNA testing, the town discovers many of the black people are descendants of the horrible cowardly rapist, Augustus Wainwright, and his statue is pulled down.

All of the good changes happen because of the banned books the town reads that were hidden in Lula Dean’s Little Free Library.

Here’s a list of the banned books Kirsten Miller recommends: “Those with an asterisk have been banned in parts of the United States. You’ll find no pornography. No Communist propaganda. Just the truth.”

*Beloved by Toni Morrison

*Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

*Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

*Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

*Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

*All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson

*Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles

*The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

*Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Battling the Big Lie by Dan Pfeiffer

Humankind by Rutger Bregman

I liked this book, but she goes too far for me. She presents things like butt plugs, tripping on mushrooms, pornography on the internet, witchcraft, as nothing to be concerned about, and that books cannot make people one way or another, but the whole premise of the book is that books can change people. I agree that books and education can change minds and hearts that have been misinformed, and I pray for that.

She dedicates the book, “For all the good people down south.” In A Note from the Author, at the end of the book, she writes about growing up in a small town in rural North Carolina, with parents who taught their children the truth. She says, “But I want to make it clear that the issues addressed in this novel–book banning, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc.–are by no means unique to the South. These are American problems. Pretending they only occur in the South has allowed them to flourish unchecked elsewhere in the United States….Contrary to popular belief, the rural South is home to countless principled, well-informed people. But I also knew kids who were far less fortunate. Some simply had no access to the truth and grew up in a vacuum that would eventually be filled with disinformation and conspiracies. A tiny but notable minority were fed a diet of hatred and lies from an early age. My heart breaks for those kids. How can you come to know what’s right when all the information you’re ever given is wrong?”

While reading this book, Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, by a 22 year-old Utahan who was raised in Saint George by Republican parents. The lies and disinformation abound on both sides of the aisle. God help us! Have mercy on us! We’ve let Satan rule in our hearts and minds and he has used abortion and homosexuality to divide us as a nation, move us far from You, where hatred and evil rule, instead of Your love and grace. God have mercy on us. Only You can truly change hearts and minds. Come, Lord Jesus, Come! Amen.

This Blood and Soil is a book one of the main characters, Beverly Underwood, read when she was a child, that educated her to the truth of slavery in America.

When Betsy Wright, a sweet mother, owner of a successful flower shop, who had to fight racism against her all of her life, finds out her son, Isaac, is gay, it devastates her. She is talking to the friendly postman and he is praising Isaac. She says, “You know he’s gay, don’t you?” He acts like that’s nothing. She tells him, “The pastor says Isaac’s soul is in jeopardy.” “The Bible says men lying with men is an abomination.” He replies, “The Bible’s got about a million words and that’s the only quote people can ever come up with to prove God frowns on gay folks. It’s from the Old Testament, which also says pigs are unclean and shouldn’t be touched. I don’t recall the pastor turning his nose up at any barbecue.”

Understanding the Changing Brain: A Positive Approach to Dementia Care

by Teepa Snow, 2021

Mom’s OT, Kaylee, recommended Teepa Snow’s book, “Dementia Caregiver Guide: Teepa Snow’s Positive Approach to Care techniques for caregiving, Alzheimer’s, and other forms of dementia,” but the library didn’t have that one. So, I got this one from the library and checked it out. It’s compassionate, caring, loving, accepting, positive, and lots of information on the brain of a person with dementia. Basically, the brain is shrinking and dying. There are 4 truths about all of the 120 types, forms, and causes of dementia:

  1. at least two parts of the brain are dying
  2. It is progressive and will get worse
  3. It is chronic-there is no cure or treatment
  4. It is fatal

“The neurons in the brain are deteriorating and dying.”

(more…) “Understanding the Changing Brain: A Positive Approach to Dementia Care”

Out of Zion: Meeting Jesus in the Shadow of the Mormon Temple

by Lisa Brockman, 2019

This book was on the monthly e-mail list of recommended biographies from the Poudre River Library. It really showed me the insides of what Mormons believe, and it is complete BS. Wow! She loved her Mormonism and it was her life as a child and a young teenager. When she started college, she dated a man named Gary who was a Christian. He asked her, “How do you know Mormonism is true?” That question started her on a very long and torturous journey of leaving the Mormon church and becoming a Christian. It is REALLY hard for Mormons to leave the Mormon church. They are shamed, ridiculed, and, according to the Mormon plan of salvation, those that leave the church will dwell in Outer Darkness forever. “Apostates and murderers will suffer the wrath of God with the devil and his angels forever.”

Mormons believe they are born of a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother in a spirit world. When a Mormon family has a child, that spirit child takes on flesh, Jesus gives them salvation, but then they must work to gain eternal life in one of three levels of a Celestial Kingdom. The way to gain eternal life is to do good works which include attending church regularly, giving a full tithe, and eventually marrying in the temple.

As she grew up, she believed this with all her heart, but then, she started partying, drinking, making out with guys, all to help her escape the pressure of the Mormon life. She started learning the history of Joseph Smith. He had 30 wives, even forcing a 14 year-old girl to marry him by telling her parents of a vision he had, making men go on mission trips so he could take their wives, the so-called Book of Abraham being an Egyptian funeral rite, and on and on. She started comparing the Jesus of the Bible to the Mormon Jesus. Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are our brothers, and when one is baptized, Jesus saves you from the sins committed up to that point, but then its up to you and your good works to gain eternal life.

Her mother and father were devastated when she finally worked up the nerve to tell them she was leaving the Mormon church to become a Christian. But, she loved them and still does, and they eventually came around. When a Mormon leaves the church, they lose everything and many decide to abandon any kind of faith. Thankfully, Lisa chose the real Jesus. She learned He is God, and He has always existed with the Father and the Spirit, three-in-one. She found freedom in Christ. She learned that good works flow out of a life of faith and from the unconditional love that God pours into our hearts. That God will never leave us nor forsake us, even when we sin.

The Mormon Church is really, really bad. They use terminology and language that sounds Christian but it is so un-Christian in every way. I realize that now. Their god is not God in any way, shape, or form.

Run away, Mormons, run away, as fast as you can, from your despicable cult, conceived and created by a very sinful, odious man.

(more…) “Out of Zion: Meeting Jesus in the Shadow of the Mormon Temple”

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

by Anne Tyler, 1982

I got this book from a Little Free Library and it was on my stack for a long time. I finally read it and it was GOOD! The main characters are Mom (Pearl), Cody (oldest son), Jenny (daughter), Ezra (youngest son). Mom is a mean, terrifying, abusive woman but filled with love for these children. The youngest boy, Ezra, loves her and each of them completely and unconditionally. He chooses to see the good, not the bad. Cody sees only the bad and he is mean and cruel, especially to Ezra. When they grow up and Ezra finally has met the woman of his dreams (Ruth) and they are about to get married, Cody steals her away and marries her. Mom knew Cody was just doing it out of spite and tells him so. Their father, Beck, up and leaves the family when the children are little. He writes letters and sends checks. Pearl never tells the children that he left, just that he was on a business trip, which was not unusual as he was a traveling salesman. But the weeks turned into months and then years and he never returns. But he always keeps in touch with Pearl and she writes down his addresses in her address book.

Jenny has trouble in love and may be anorexic. She’s a beauty. She becomes a doctor, but is going through residency and is 8 months pregnant when her husband leaves her. It turns out she is starting to be abusive to her baby girl, when her mother comes to the rescue and takes care of everything so Jenny can finish her training and become a pediatrician. Jenny eventually marries a man with 6 kids whose wife left them, and she is an energetic, fun-loving, optimistic, hard-working, tireless, loving wife and mom and doctor.

Ezra is the loving child who Cody picks on his entire childhood, and steals his one and only love (Ruth). Ruth and Ezra were going to be married and live over the restaurant Ezra owns (the Homesick Restaurant). They love food and cooking food. Cody steals Ruth away, he doesn’t even like her type (red-head, not glamorous, small). But he steals her away and makes her fall in love with him. Cody is terrible. Yet Ezra never, never, never hates. He still wants the family to come to the restaurant for family dinners at Thanksgiving, Christmas. He invites them and they come but it never works – someone always gets mad and leaves before anything can be served.

Ezra takes care of his mom until she dies. He lives with her, still sleeping in his childhood bedroom. She told him to invite everyone in her address book to her funeral. There aren’t very many people – she had no friends or family except for the children and their families. But Beck, the husband and father who abandoned her and the children, is in there, and Ezra writes to him and he comes.

Ezra has, once again, planned a family dinner, this time including Beck. Cody tries to destroy it and Beck does leave the restaurant in a rush, but Ezra demands everyone go and find him. Cody finds him sitting on a stoop and has a heart-to-heart with him, finds out why he left them (Pearl was a witch to him, he couldn’t do anything right, it was misery). He never divorced her though, and he did come back once and watch Cody from afar and determined they were happy, so left again.

But it seems that, in the end, Beck is going to stay with them. He really has nothing to return to. So that is how it ends – they all go back to the restaurant.

The writing was EXCELLENT. I loved this book but it was pretty alarming the abuse handed out by Pearl and then Jenny. Those passages were few, and slipped in here and then there. Ezra is the shining light – forgiving and loving all. And Pearl gave the children a gift in the end – their father – he really didn’t want to abandon them, he just couldn’t take life with her.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers, 2000, 2001 (First Vintage Books Edition: February 2001)

I got this book from the Little Free Library in front of Poppy’s house on Locust Street. It was mostly laugh out loud funny and I adored it until the end. It’s a memoir. Dave’s father and mother died within 5 weeks of each other, both of cancer. His mother was expected, taking her slowly. His dad went first though, and none of them expected that. He was a smoker, an alcoholic, sometimes mean and scary. Dave and his sister Beth (but mostly Dave) end up raising their little brother, Tofe, whom they love so much. They move to California – first Berkeley, then San Francisco. The book is full of Dave’s angst and worry about Tofe and everything that goes with raising a child, and it’s hilarious. Tofe seems to be an incredibly healthy, fun, happy, beautiful child. And Dave can write! The words just flow perfectly onto the page from his mind, it seems.

(more…) “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”

Blood Work

by Michael Connelly, 1998

Really good book – I got it from the Little Free Library in Cooper Landing, Alaska, along the bike path. It’s a crime mystery. A former FBI agent, Terry McCaleb, has received a heart transplant. The heart was from a murdered woman, Gloria Torres. Gloria’s sister, Graciela, comes to Terry while he is living and recovering on his boat in the marina. She asks him to find the killer. At first he refuses, until she tells him he has her sister’s heart. Then starts the most intricately detailed, meticulous investigation. It turns out, when Terry was an FBI agent, he tried to find the Code Killer. He never could. The Code Killer stopped killing and is mentioned only briefly in the first 300 pages, as an aside. But then, in the end, Terry finds out the Code Killer killed for Terry – to be sure Terry lived, got a new heart. He had to kill three people to get it right, and Terry figures out the three people are linked because they have the correct rare blood type for a list of people waiting for a transplant. When none of those people are rich or powerful, all eyes turn towards Terry – he becomes the #1 suspect, and then it all starts to fall into place. Fascinating, well-written, loved this book! Love this author! He is not graphic, although what he is writing about could be very disturbing. I was so afraid Buddy was going to be the murderer, but he wasn’t. Buddy is a fellow boatman who drove Terry around to investigate. He sometimes found things that no one else could find. But, thankfully, he was a good guy – the murderer was someone else. Fun book by Michael Connelly. I’ve never read him before. I have another book by him, The Closers, that Mom read last year, when she first moved into Parkwood Estates, which she said was a really good book. I will read that soon. I can’t believe she actually could read a book because she hasn’t really read one since. It must be a very good book.

London After Midnight

Selected and Edited by Peter Haining, 1996

I got this book from a Little Free Library, I think the one by the Spring Park Fire Station. It was fun! There were 22 short stories by various authors. The stories were detective mysteries. I read this book while up in Alaska for 3 weeks with Adam, Danette, and Eliya. I was usually very sleepy and the stories blended together, but the overall feeling was of early 1900s London. It was fun. There was one haunting story, by P.D. James, that I didn’t like at all – The Girl Who Loved Graveyards. The ending was one of those psycho-scary twists you aren’t expecting and it was unsettling. But the other stories were fun and took me away to Britain. There were stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Graham Greene, and a bunch of others. Fun book.

Joshua: A Parable for Today

by Joseph F. Girzone, 1995

Danette recommended I read this book, one of her favorites, while I was up in Alaska June 2025. It’s about a modern day Jesus who comes to live in a small American village. He is a simple carpenter, working with wood, but he carves statues that are beautiful. He is loved by the children and the families. But eventually he crosses with church leaders, especially the Catholic church leaders, and they have him sent to Italy to meet with the Pope. He disappears in the end. But his teachings are that the rules laid down by the churches are wrong and they lead people away from God. God is love and freedom. The Church has done to God the same thing the Pharisees did when Jesus was here.

Here are four pages that were highlighted that show the book in a nutshell:

The Diary of Mattie Spenser

Version 1.0.0

by Sandra Dallas, 1998

Carol Sparks gave me this book to read in the airport and on the airplane on the way to Alaska. It kept me entertained during the entire trip. I finished it in one day. I left it in a beautiful Little Free Library on the Snug Harbor Road in Cooper Landing, AK.

It’s about a young woman, Mattie Spenser, who marries and travels to the Colorado Territory in the 1860s. The book is her diary. She recounts the terrors of the trip – Indian attacks – and then the hardship of living in a sod house on the Colorado prairie. Their first child, a beloved son, died at the age of 2, of scarlet fever. Her husband, his dad, was cheating on Mattie, and took the precious boy with him and kept him in the freezing cold for hours waiting for his rendezvous with the woman. Mattie realizes this and could have left him for a man who loved her, but she doesn’t.

Good book. Life was incredibly hard.

Sunrise on the Reaping

by Suzanne Collins, 2025

Book 5 of the Hunger Games series. Hopeless and depressing – the prequel to Katniss and Peeta’s story. This is about the 50th anniversary of the Hunger Games, when Haymitch Abernathy is taken from District 12. He’s a 16 year-old and he narrates the story, and it’s awful – everyone he likes, loves, ends up dead. Everything he tries to do ends up failing. He ends up the victor but when he returns home, the first thing that happens is his mom and little brother, Sid, burn to death in a horrible fire. Then, he sees his love, Lenore Dove, running to him in a beautiful meadow, and she finds a bag of gumdrops. He feeds her one and it ends up being poison. She dies in his arms. These are the very last pages of the book. The first 350 pages are more of the same – Haymitch truly cares about someone and they die a horrible death. Or Haymitch has a plan to blow up the arena and it fails. Everyone he loves dies a horrible death. Everything he tries to do fails miserably. He is alone. He’s a wretched alcoholic and lives with no purpose until the Epilogue when he meets Katniss and Peeta and they bring him a basket of goose eggs, not to eat, but to hatch. Then he can fulfill his promise to Lenore Dove to end the reaping. But it takes 380 pages of awfulness, sadness, futility, with no hope, to get to the last 2 pages of Epilogue where there is finally some hope.

The Book Woman’s Daughter

by Kim Michele Richardson, 2022

Pat was reading this so I decided to get it from the library and read it. It was not as good as The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. There is a really bad dude (Perry Gillis) in this one and he causes so much heartache and misery. He kills his wife by throwing her down the well in front of his little boy. He tries to kill the fire lookout, Pearl. He abuses Bonnie, the widowed coal miner. He abuses little Wrenna and her rooster, Tommie. Finally, he gets attacked by Tommie, the rooster. He is slashed and gouged and blinded. While in the hospital, the state police finally believe Honey Lovett, the Book Woman’s daughter, and they go to his cabin. The little boy tells them his mommy is in the well. They find her body. All through this, however, is the prejudice against Honey Lovett, the Book Woman’s daughter. They arrested her Mom and Dad for miscegenation laws because Honey’s mom is a blue-skinned white person, which Kentucky considered to be as black people. Honey is left on her own and appeals for her emancipation. There are good people in this town and the surrounding hills. They love Honey – she is their new book woman. All turns out okay but it is tedious and difficult when bad people keep getting away with their evilness.

Two quotes from the book: “‘Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.'” (A quote from Rabindranath Tagore, a poetry book Honey’s mom loaned to Mr. Taft and it changed his life.)

Page 193: “A man can’t be both smart and hungry at the same time.” Similar to what Honey’s mom said, “Can’t be angry and smart at the same time. Now, nothing wrong in having the anger, but the two rarely work together.”

Miss Silver Comes to Stay

by Patricia Wentworth, 1948

I got this book from a Little Free Library. It is a fun mystery. It’s set in 1940’s England, in a charming little village. You think you know who murdered James Lessiter all along, but it turns out to be someone completely unsuspected. Miss Silver, a beloved elderly governess turned private detective, figures it out and saves the innocents from being wrongly accused, although all the evidence pointed to them (Rietta Cray and her nephew, Carr Robertson). In the end, the good guys win and the bad guys are dead. The characters, the setting, the plot are so good – such a fun book to read, it really takes you away. I love these old English mysteries!

Man’s Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl, written in 9 days in 1945, first published 1946

Danette recommended this book, along with The Tattooist of Auschwitz. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time. The copy I read includes 6 parts: a Foreword by Harold S. Kushner; the Preface to the 1992 Edition; Part I, the story itself, Experiences in a Concentration Camp; Part II, Logotherapy in a Nutshell; the Postscript 1984; and an Afterword by William J. Winslade. Almost every single page of these 6 parts has a sticky note on it for a nugget of wisdom for life. The copy I read includes the 6 parts mentioned and was published by Beacon Press in 2006 or thereabouts.

The main point of the book is this: Human beings must have something or someone to live for; we must have meaning. Without meaning to our lives, we become hopeless, depressed, despairing. And, even in the worst of places, environments, situations, you can choose your attitude and find something to live for.

(more…) “Man’s Search for Meaning”

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

by Mark Twain, 1899

This is the last story in the Pudd’nhead Wilson book. It’s about a town, Hadleyburg, in which the residents pride themselves on their honesty. A man comes to town once and is hurt so badly, he devises a plan to get back at the town and expose their hypocrisy. After a year, he comes back with a supposed sack of gold and a letter with instructions, and deposits them in the home of the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Richards. Mrs. Richards tells her husband when he comes home and rather than keep the money and tell no one, he publishes the letter, which is a contest to find a supposed man who helped the gambler by giving him $20 and telling him something that changed his life. What were those words? Each of the 19 families receives a letter telling them that they were the ones and giving them the phrase. The night of the contest, the joke is on the 19 families, except for some reason, the Richards’s note is lost and they are believed to be the only honest family. But they know they are not. They get the money but it makes them crazy and they die a few weeks later in torment.

It’s a story about self-righteousness, greediness, dishonesty, suspicion, etc. I was convicted – I’m afraid I might have been one of the dishonest ones, lying in order to get the $40,000 sack of gold. There was one honest man in the town, Jack Halliday, who really was incorruptible, full of humor and honesty.

Mark Twain is a genius!

Those Extraordinary Twins

by Mark Twain, 1894

This is the second story in the Pudd’nhead Wilson book. It’s about true Siamese twins, Luigi and Angelo, and it’s crazy! He presents them in all seriousness, though. They come to live with Aunt Patsy Cooper and her daughter, Rowena. The whole town comes to love them. One is serious (Angelo) and the other is a carouser (Luigi). They have two heads, 4 arms and one pair of legs. Each twin gets the pair of legs for exactly one week. It changes at the stroke of midnight, no matter what time zone they are in, on Saturday night. Angelo gets drunk when Luigi drinks. Luigi wants to drink and carouse and stay up all night. Angelo wants to become a Baptist, but Luigi is afraid the baptism will drown him. It’s weird and a bit crazy, and in the end, the town hangs Luigi, because he was guilty of something. “And so ends the history of ‘Those Extraordinary Twins.'”

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

by Heather Morris, 2018

Danette recommended this book. It was very, very good. Took you into the lives of Lale and Gita, two Slovak Jews who meet in Auschwitz and it is love at first sight. Lale is the tattooist, the man who tattoos the numbers on the inmates. They somehow survive Auschwitz-Birkenau and, when the Russians arrive in 1945, and everything is in disarray, they escape, but not together. Lale cannot forget Gita, and he searches and finds her on a street in Slovakia, and they get married and live happily ever after. They move to Australia and that is where the author meets Lale and decides to write down his story, first as a play, and then as a novel. I’m not sure why it is considered a novel, since it is a true story. Excellent book.

They survived from 1942 to 1945 by being young and hard-working. Also, Lale bought extra rations from some Polish workers who came in every day to build the crematoria. Lale was given money and jewels by the female prisoners who went through the belongings of each new train load of prisoners brought to Auschwitz. The girls would hide money and jewels and give some to Lale, who hid them in his mattress. One day, the stash was discovered, and he was almost killed – spent three weeks in a torture chamber. But, again, he was saved because the man assigned to torture him was a prisoner whom he had saved. The torturer made it sound like he was killing Lale, but he didn’t, and Lale was able to survive without telling on any of the female prisoners.

It amazed me what Lale and Gita were able to get away with while in prison. Lale used some of the jewels to bribe a female guard, who would let Lale and Gita have time alone together.

The author did a good job exposing the horrors of the camp without destroying the reader. In the beginning, she describes how Lale was taken – innocent people tricked into volunteering to go to the camp to save the rest of their family (who ended up being taken anyway), or innocent people who were rounded up off the streets all over Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Romania (gypsy’s were rounded up); some immediately killed in the gas chambers, some worked to death, some able to survive and tell their stories. The world must never forget this evil. We must not let it happen again. God save us, God have mercy on us. ICE agents are rounding up so called “illegal” immigrants, many because they have a tattoo, and are making them sign papers under duress, that they don’t understand, and shipping them to a prison in El Salvador. Stop the madness! Stop the evil! Please God!

Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel, 2014

Found this book in a Little Free Library and it happens to be the Old Town Library’s April 2025 book selection. It was a good book, very well written with really interesting characters, but sort of wandering. It’s about a Traveling Symphony in a world after a flu kills 99.9% of all the people on earth in a matter of weeks. It’s about what happens to the people who are left, some of whom were connected to a really popular actor named Arthur Leander. Arthur dies of a heart attack doing King Lear in Toronto, just hours before the pandemic takes hold. She does a deep-dive into his life – three wives, one son, a good friend, and a little child actress named Kirsten. He gives Kirsten a copy of a comic book his first wife created, called Station Eleven. She carries it with her all through the decades following, as she travels with the Traveling Symphony. The Traveling Symphony walks, they have horses and wagons. It’s all very primitive. The stars are visible again. There are plants and animals everywhere. No one knows anything except their little bit of space and time. Except the Traveling Symphony – they get around a bit more. They run into an evil guy, The Prophet, who thinks the pandemic was God’s judgement and he is the light and he needs to spread it around. He kidnaps his multiple wives, brainwashes his followers, etc. Thankfully, she doesn’t go into a lot of detail regarding his sick mind or his sick actions and he is murdered towards the end. But right before he is murdered, he starts reciting parts of Station Eleven, and Kirsten, who he is about to murder, starts reciting it, too. That saves Kirsten and gives time for the good guys to kill the evil guy. Kirsten thought she had the only copy of Station Eleven, but realizes he had a copy of it, too. It turns out, The Prophet is Arthur Leander’s only son, and Arthur had mailed him a copy of Station Eleven, the only other copy, right before he died.

This book was written 5 years before Covid-19 hit. I wonder what Emily St. John Mandel thought about COVID when it first hit. It sure changed our world but not as drastically as the mutated swine flu in her book.

From Esquire in December 13, 2021: “Who was she, a novelist who’d fictionalized a thoroughly researched but “not particularly scientifically plausible” pandemic, as she describes it, to be viewed as an authority?”…“If it helps, as alarming as this moment is, I remain certain that this isn’t going to end with a traveling Shakespearean theatre company traversing the wasteland of the post-apocalypse,” Mandel offered kindly to one supplicant. The response was textbook Mandel: wry, warm, and unfailingly generous.”…

“It’s a story where civilization collapses, but our humanity persists—maybe there’s something there that people wanted to absorb,” Mandel says. “At the same time, at the beginning of the pandemic, I remember the difficulty of adapting to a life of pure uncertainty. I wanted clues about how this might go, or how it might end. I wanted certainty about the future. Maybe that’s why people reached for Station Eleven, to try to force ourselves to confront what could happen.”…

“What becomes really obvious, if you research pandemics, is that there was always going to be another pandemic,” Mandel says. “It’s just something that happens in our history. There will be something else after Covid-19, and something else after that. It’s like if a novelist had written a novel in the sixties about a fictional war. Does that mean they predicted the Vietnam War? No—there was always going to be another war.”

HBO Max made a 10-part series of Station Eleven. Emily was writing The Glass Hotel, so she didn’t have anything to do with the making of it, but she watched it when it came out – we were 2 years into the COVID pandemic. “But the show moved her deeply, and rang true to the novel’s indefatigable spirit. “It’s weird to say this about a story where almost everybody on earth dies, but it’s rendered with such joy,” Mandel says. “There’s just a lot of love in that story.”…

“That sweetness is all around us. It’s in tea on a terrace, readers grasping for truth in the dark, a writer’s words tattooed on someone’s skin. It’s in Mandel’s urban garden, one of her great pandemic-era sources of beauty and pleasure. Around us bloom the fruits of her labor: over a dozen potted trees, dappled with radiant morning light. “I’m so incredibly grateful for this life,” Mandel muses.

“This life, this world. It’s still here. So are we.”

Beautiful article about Emily St. John Mandel and Station Eleven, written by Mike McGregor for Esquire in December 2021.

For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind

by Tulsi Gabbard, 2024

Adam asked me to read this book. He forewarned me that it would make me mad. I should have asked him why he thought it would make me mad. I think the thing that makes him mad is how when Tulsi was running for President, and had completed her first debate for the Democrats, something happened with Google so people could not find her campaign ad when they looked her up. She thinks the “Democrat elite” were behind this. She sued Google for $50,000,000 but lost. The same thing would have happened if she had been a Republican candidate for President and done a debate with the Republicans. A little known website all of the sudden starts having tons of activity and money, Google shuts it down until they can determine if it’s legal. That’s all. So, had she been a Republican candidate, the same thing would have happened. She blames the “Democrat elite,” the same ones who didn’t realize that the Russians had infiltrated Facebook and flooded social media with trolls spreading lies and disinformation about Hillary. So, now Tulsi has aligned herself with, and is working for, Trump, who is the antithesis of honesty and decency, who is doing everything he can to end democracy in America; ignoring the rule of law and the Constitution, not caring about the American people at all, befriending dictators, causing chaos and destruction and hurting people. The fears she has about the Democrat elites are the exact things we are experiencing under Trump: Someone who ignores the rule of law, is doing all he can to remain in power, wants to change the Constitution so that can happen, alienating the world, silencing dissent, trying to destroy our free speech, unlawfully rounding people up and shipping them off, working to undo any hope we had for curbing climate change, destroying the world economy, calling evil good (Putin) and good, evil. And on and on and on. Today is April 5th. I’ve been writing on this since April 1st. There is something new everyday, but I will end this on April 5th, 2025.

What makes me angry about this book is how blind and deceived she is to the evil Trump is doing. She writes over and over again about how much she cares about our country, that there is a threat to our democracy. In the Prologue: “The insanity and threats to our constitutional democracy will not fade away and will only increase unless we stand up and remind those trying to destroy this country that ours is a government of, by, and for the people.” There is one person who is a threat to our democracy and is trying to destroy our country, and that is Trump. He has now been in office for 75 days. In that 75 days, we have turned our back on our allies. He is attempting to silence all dissent. He is attempting to undermine fair and free elections. He is trying to become President for life – just like Putin. He wants us to be like Russia, a country where millions live below the poverty level while the ruler and his men are fabulously wealthy with palaces, yachts, luxuries. Where there is only one television station, Russia Today, which spews propaganda all day, and which Tulsi Gabbard believes tells the truth. Where anyone who tries to reveal the corruption is poisoned, and if that doesn’t work, put in prison under false charges, and murdered. Where there is no truth, only lies, from the top down, invading every part of life. Where there is hopelessness, despair, alcoholism. That is where America is headed under Trump. There is so much hatred and division now, we are going to be a nation high in suicides, divorces, alcoholism, and domestic terrorism. And all this because some people are so afraid of transgender rights that they are willing to vote for a despicable person who cares absolutely nothing for them, who has not one iota of integrity, dignity, grace, or heart.

(more…) “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind”