Category: Favorites

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Giver of Stars

by Jojo Moyes, 2019 Fantastic book about pack-horse librarians in Kentucky during the Depression. This book has everything: Characters you love, characters you hate, a couple of mysteries, well-written, deep sense of place, and a very good ending. Loved this book! It was recommended to me by Christie.

The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson, 2015 This book is a hilarious trip through England with the funniest writer alive, Bill Bryson. What a joy! What a great escape! It’s laugh-out-loud funny on every page. I didn’t realize that Wayne would be interested in reading this book, but he was. And what’s more, he’d like to spend a […]

The Lake House

by Kate Morton, 2015 Loved this book! Suggested by Christie. Set in Cornwall, England, in WWI, WWII, and modern days (2003). Wonderful setting – a beautiful lake house in Cornwall, near the sea. Interesting characters: a spinster mystery writer and her sisters and mother and father, and a precious baby brother who disappears and is […]