by James McBride, 2020 I LOVED this book! It was the Old Town Library Book Club selection for April 2022. Both Leslie and Mandy picked it. It took me someplace I didn’t want to be – a housing project, the Cause Houses, in NYC – complete with drug pushers, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and criminals. But […]
Category: Favorites
Deacon King Kong
Moonshine
by Alec Wilkinson, 1985 Captivating book about a revenuer in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, names Garland Bunting. He’s an ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) officer in Halifax County. He is fearless and talented and a brilliant strategist and tireless and a great actor and entertainer and lovable and friendly and a salt-of-the-earth kind […]
Cider with Rosie
by Laurie Lee, 1959 First of all, Laurie Lee is a male! This is his story of growing up in a Cotswold village in the 1920s. He transports you there. You can feel the summer heat, the icy winter, the mud, the grass, the trees, the cottage he grew up in with his 6 siblings […]
Counterfeit Gods
The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters by Timothy Keller, 2009 Another EXCELLENT book by Tim Keller! All of us replace loving God first and most with idols like money, sex, and power, but also approval, acceptance, love, success, security, comfort, and control. Worshiping idols rather than God […]
Born a Crime
by Trevor Noah, 2016 Fantastic book! Remarkable man! Amazing Mom! This was one of our book selections for the Old Town Library Book Club, 2021-2022 season. Trevor Noah, a famous comedian now, was born under Apartheid in South Africa, to a Xhosa mother and a Swiss father. She never asked to marry his Swiss father […]
The Bogey Man: A Month on the PGA Tour
by George Plimpton, 1968 A wonderfully funny book recommended by the Book-A-Day calendar from Christie. George Plimpton spends a month on the PGA tour at three courses in California, and writes about it. It is just delightful! He is a very good writer, especially when it comes to conversations. He gets you into the game […]
Hotel Pastis: A Novel of Provence
by Peter Mayle, 1993 Delightful book! Recommended on my Christie book-a-day calendar. Takes you from dreary England and back-biting advertising world to sunny France. The main character, Simon Shaw, is a wealthy advertising executive who is hassled by an ex-wife who just wants more and more of his money. He takes a much-needed vacation to […]
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
by Kim Michele Richardson, 2019 Wonderful book recommended by neighbor, Pat. Historical fiction, 1930s, a “Blue” horse pack librarian (Cussy Mary), who faces hardship, tragedy, racism, but finds true love in the Kentucky mountains. There were really blue-skinned people, who had congenital methemoglobinemia, but were considered “coloreds” and discriminated against. This is a fictional account […]
The Next Everest
by Jim Davidson, 2021 Excellent memoir by a mountain climber who lives in Fort Collins. The Library recommended this book on their monthly “Biographies” e-mail. It was about his two trips to Nepal to climb Mount Everest; the first in 2015 when the deadly 7.8 Gorkha earthquake struck Nepal and caused an avalanche on Mount […]
Crossing the Line
by Kareem Rosser, 2021 Excellent book! Learned about it from the Library’s monthly Biographies email. As I was reading their description of the book, about a young black man who learned to play polo in inner-city Philadelphia, and came to CSU for college, I realized I had read his scholarship application! I made sure he […]
Swallows and Amazons
by Arthur Ransome, 1930 Precious, beautiful, sweet book about 4 children in 1930s England whose mother (and father, by telegram from a destroyer on the China Seas) allow them to sail away and camp on an island in the lake, and all the wonderful adventures they have. They meet pirates, 2 girls their age who […]
Village School
by “Miss Read,” Mrs. Dora Jessie Saint, 1955 What a sweet, sweet book! Transports you to an English village in about the 1930s. It’s precious – the people, the cottages, the school, the children. She takes you through the 3 terms of school: Christmas Term, Spring Term, Summer Term. She teaches the older kids and […]
Johnny Tremain: A Story of Boston in Revolt
by Esther Forbes, 1943 What a wonderful book. I loved being with Johnny Tremain in Boston in the 1770s. It was on the Book-a-Day calendar from Christie: “For fans of The Simpsons: Can you recall what novel about the American Revolution captivated that not-so-eager reader Bart? ANSWER: Esther Forbes’s novel of revolutionary-era Boston, Johnny Tremain, […]
Voices of the Colorado Trail
by David W. Fanning, 2017 (rawahranger.com) David Fanning is a photographer who posts his photos on Next Door. They are excellent! Many are of owls and other birds. He lives in the Sheely Addition which is near Red Fox Meadows. He was asked if he ever considered writing a bird book and he answered with […]
The Enchanted April
by Elizabeth Von Arnim, 1922 This book was recommended on the “Page-a-Day” book calendar Christie gave me. I loved it. It was a wonderful escape to Italy in the 1920s. Four English ladies, strangers to one another, share an old castle on the coast of Italy near Genoa for the month of April. Each one […]
The Reason for God
Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Timothy Keller, 2008 Another excellent book by Tim Keller. This one explains logically, thoroughly, and beautifully how the God of the Bible exists and is real. In Part 1: The Leap of Doubt, the arguments against God are presented and examined. Chapter titles are: There Can’t Be Just […]
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
by Timothy Keller, 2013 The definitive book on pain and suffering and God. Why suffering exists (why does God allow evil), the different types of suffering, suffering in history, how to suffer, where is God in the suffering. It used to be that people did not find suffering such a shock or something to be […]
Anxious People
by Fredrik Backman, 2019 (translation to English by Neil Smith, 2020) I LOVED this book! I started out not liking it at all – not liking the characters except for Jack, the young policeman, and his father, Jim, also a policeman. But then, you gradually come to love each of the characters: Jack and his […]
The Sea and the Jungle
by H. M. Tomlinson, 1930 This was a book recommended on the book-a-day calendar that Christie gave me. I almost gave up on it at the start because it was so difficult to read – big words I didn’t know the meaning of, long sentences, etc. But, I hung in there and I’m so glad […]
Islands in the Stream
by Ernest Hemingway, 1970 (Ernest Hemingway shot himself in July 1961 with his favorite shotgun in the entryway of his Ketchum, Idaho home. Mary Hemingway, his 4th and final wife, and Charles Scribner, Jr. published this book from Ernest’s original manuscript: “Charles Scribner, Jr. and I worked together preparing this book for publication from Ernest’s […]