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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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.'”
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!
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.
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.
by Alexei Navalny, 2024, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
Memoir written by one brave man who tried to bring truth to Russia in the last 25 years. He was murdered by Putin for his efforts. He was too popular, spreading truth, revealing the lies and corruption of Putin. He loved his country and decided to go back to it after being poisoned with a nerve agent by Putin. He could have stayed away and lived (perhaps), but he had to go back. He was arrested in the airport in Russia in January 2021 and taken from one prison to another for 3 years, until he was murdered in prison in Siberia in 2024. He wrote most of this memoir in the hospital in Germany where he recovered after being poisoned. The last quarter of the memoir are his Instagram posts and his prison diaries, which he managed to smuggle out to his lawyers, when he was allowed to meet with them.
I got this book from a little free library and finally read the first story, Pudd’nhead Wilson. I loved it so much! It’s a treasure of a story. Pudd’nhead Wilson is actually a very smart, very kind, very wise man, who moves to Dawson City and wants to be a lawyer there, but he crosses a dog owner first thing, a little yapper who would not stop yapping the entire time they tried to have a conversation. He said something like, If I owned half that dog, I’d kill my half, or something like that. He stays even though no one would ever come to his office because of that one comment. He has hobbies and one of them is to take the town-folks’ fingerprints.
This comes in handy when a thief, supposedly a woman, kills the beloved Judge with an Indian knife that was stolen from two twin brothers from Italy. Pudd’nhead Wilson is defending the innocent twins and it doesn’t look good. But the actual thief and murderer, Tom Driscoll, can’t keep his mouth shut and the night before the last day of the trial, goes to harangue Pudd’nhead and gives him exactly what he needed to figure it out. Sure enough, the fingerprints on the knife match Tom Driscoll’s and all is found out. The guilty party is convicted and the innocents are absolved of all guilt, in front of the whole town. It’s a wonderful, intriguing, amazing tale, and I absolutely love Mark Twain!
Each chapter starts with a pithy quote from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar. I love this one: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Another: Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear…
My Favorite: October 12. –The Discovery.–It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
I got this book from a Little Free Library. It is wonderful! It is 9 short stories about East Indians or Bengali immigrants to the United States, or one or two take place in India. She is such an excellent writer! Each story is so different from the others but each one takes you away to a different world. I cared about each character. Keep this book forever! It was wonderful!
Jerome K. Jerome, 1889 (born May 2, 1859; died June 14, 1927-68 years old)
This was one of Mom’s Time Reading Program editions. I remember her reading it and saying it was the funniest book she had ever read. I kept it when she moved, and I agree, it is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read! I LOVED IT!!!! Jerome K. Jerome is hilarious!!!
The book is about a river trip up the Thames River, from London to Oxford. He (J.), two of his friends (George and Harris), and his dog, a Fox-Terrier named Montmorency, take a two-week vacation (a fortnight) up the river in a boat. It’s 211 pages of fun! Every single scene, from the gathering of supplies to the final scene in a French restaurant with full stomachs looking out at the rain, is laugh-out-loud funny.
There is a sober moment, when they come upon a dead woman floating in the river, and he tells her story as they come to find it out, with a lot of care and sadness and regret. But mostly it is funny. I especially like his description of work and his attitude toward it in Chapter 15: “It seemed to me that I was doing more than my fair share of the work on this trip, and I was beginning to feel strongly on the subject.
Moving Forward When You’re Skeptical of Others, Afraid of What God Will Allow, and Doubtful of Your Own Discernment
by Lysa TerKeurst Adams, 2024
Lysa is the president of Proverbs 31 Ministries. She was hurt deeply by her first husband, and by other ministry organizations. This book is about how she got through the pain and learned to trust again. She is now married to a wonderful, trustworthy, godly man named Chaz. Her writing is personal. She is a gift to the world. She is beautiful, inside and out, and so courageous. She is willing to lay bare all the deep, dark places inside of her, and show them to all who want to know. Her purposes are to show that people are not alone in their pain, and that Jesus is there with them, through it all, and they can emerge victorious; stronger and wiser and seeing the beauty of the world, with more joy and peace.
I love one of the stories she tells. It’s about a fallen oak tree she came across on a gentle hike, with a sign posted in front of it: “The Resilient Oak Tree: The storm that felled this tree didn’t stop it from protecting both the forest and island community with its thriving canopy.” The tree had fallen but it didn’t die; it grew new roots and is still living, providing shelter and beauty. She said it was the most beautiful tree in that forest; broken but re-created into a beautiful, living tree, providing shelter and life.
I adored this book. I got it from a little free library in the neighborhood. I took it to Montana December 2024 when I went there to help Adam and Danette after Eliya was born. It’s a little book so was easy to stuff in my carry-on. Twelve mysteries set in England, the Riviera, and a Greek Isle, all involving an elderly man, Mr. Satterthwaite, and a mysterious Mr. Harley Quin, who shows up unexpectedly whenever humans need a little help, or a death needs to be solved. Each story took me away to a wonderful, rich world.
The last story, though, ends with Mr. Satterthwaite in Mr. Harley Quin’s Lovers Lane, a beautiful lane that ends in a dump. I am not sure about it:
Adam’s book. He loaned it to me when I told him about my greatest fear is that he will be hurt. He read it on his way to Las Vegas in March 2024 for a Christmas Light seminar. His boarding pass was tucked in page 38. Page 38 is about a purposeful life being an adventurous, risky life. “Life is full of danger and threats and scary things that go bump in the night. Nobody is getting out alive. We may feel secure or safe because we’ve reduced our life to a level where we don’t have to face anything we fear–but that security is an illusion. It just means it will eventually show up in your nice, safe little world and shock you.” This is an excellent book! It’s a road map on how to navigate the life of faith. It describes a circular pattern of life and faith, starting with a turning point, then courage, then the Guide (the Holy Spirit), then the decision, the adventure (challenge), the dark cave, the resolution, the new perspective, and lastly, the message. He used his time in Acapulco, Mexico, to demonstrate each of the stages. He was asked by missionary friends to take over their ministry in Acapulco. The ministry was extraordinarily dangerous – drug cartels, corrupt cops, violent gangs – and difficult – no conveniences, everything broken and rotting. But, he got the clear message to do this so he and his wife did. The whole thing felt like an overwhelming failure and disaster. But he realized in retrospect that he grew immensely in his walk with God. The ultimate goal of life is to grow more and more Christ-like in humility and love.
