The Cue Card

Hi Bookworms, Happy Easter. I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend full of chocolate bunnies, Easter eggs, and spring flowers. I’m holding down the fort with the dogs since my husband is away on a trip.

We had a wild snowstorm here a couple days ago that left about six inches of heavy white stuff on the ground but then within 48 hours it was gone as if we’d never had it. The earth just soaked it up. Meanwhile I’ve been going through a surge of spring cleaning, paring down things in closets and drawers, and taking unwanted things and clothes to the thrift shop. It feels great once you set your mind to it. Nothing is safe from the purge, except perhaps books, lol.

Afterwards Willow and I got some reading done in the sunroom (see photo). She was snoozing a bit more than reading, but we hadn’t been in there all winter since it’s not heated. We enjoyed our inaugural sunroom siesta, yay. Do you have a special spot or place where you like to read?

And now here (above) are a couple novels that came in for me at the library. Will I get to these? Time will tell. I hope they are good.

• The Golden Boy by Patricia Finn —about “a disgraced TV executive and his wife who retire to Maui, where their life of leisure is interrupted by news that they’ve been named guardians to a late friend’s four grandchildren,” according to PW. And:
• Upward Bound by Woody Brown — that “delves into the lives and minds of the disabled residents of an adult day care center in Southern California.”

And now below are a few reviews of what I finished lately. All three were audiobook listens, while I’m currently reading Buckeye as a buddy read with Tina at Turn the Page. We’ll be done this week, so I’ll review it next time.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar / Knopf / 224 pages / 2025

Synopsis: In a near future Kolkata, India, with intense heat and food scarcity, a woman referred to as Ma, the manager of a local shelter, is gearing up to leave on a flight in seven days with her two-year-old daughter Mishti and her father Dadu to join her scientist husband in Michigan. But in the morning she finds that her purse is missing and has been stolen with their passports and special climate visas. She has less than a week to find the thief and their coveted documents. It’s a desperate search, and along the way their lives and the teenage thief Boomba’s backstory is revealed and his attempt to care for his family in need.

My Thoughts: 4 stars. This turns into a compelling doozy. Which leaves you with the sick feeling to: don’t ever lose your passport and visa in the days before your flight, especially when you’re trying to flee a collapsing city. The police won’t help you, and the consulate will need a police report which you can’t get. Poor Ma, she battles on in desperation with her father Dadu helping … trying to find the thief. Meanwhile her husband occasionally calls, but she keeps him in the dark, without telling him what’s happening. He’s more clueless than any, even more than baby Mishti, who senses the troubles and is given sweet onions to eat since that’s what there is.

I admit I wanted to strangle the young thief Boomba for his series of transgressions though the plot throws some sympathy his way. And Ma, who’s taken a bit from the shelter in the past, is not too squeaky clean herself. Ma and Boomba are trying to do what they can to get by and help their families. Still mostly you hope beyond hope that Ma, Dadu, and Mishti will be on that damn flight … get on the tarmac and lift off. Down the stretch you’ll be navigating some twists and then the ending will hit down like a hammer. It’s a short novel that packs a punch.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson / FSG / 116 pages / 2011

4.5 stars. I loved the storytelling and earthiness of this novella … the depictions of the natural world and the oddities Robert Grenier sees living out West during the first decades of the 20th century. Robert is an adopted orphan who grows up in Idaho in the 1890s. He works in lumber and for the railroad then takes a job in Washington state repairing the Gorge bridge, only to return home later to find his valley up in flames.

What happens to his wife and child early in the book and the sadness he goes through is very hard and touches down to the bone. He struggles with his own guilt, though there’s a quiet goodness about him and he has an array of experiences, seeing the world in ways that you come to know. There’s even a bit of humor or whimsy to the characters and animals he comes across working as a wagon driver. Like he almost saw Elvis Presley at a train stop once but he was hung up and didn’t. Though he did see the fattest man in the world when he came through town on exhibit.

Robert’s grief makes him see wolf creatures too at times … and he wonders if one is his daughter. All around it’s a good short almost mystical tale at times that I wished had been made into a full-fledged novel about Robert Grenier. This was my first Denis Johnson book but now I’d like to read his others.

The movie adaptation of Train Dreams with Joel Edgerton is good too. It’s a quiet film that gets across Robert’s struggles and his life in the West. It received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Original Song but didn’t win any in the end. Interesting too — is that Will Patton, who narrated the audiobook so well back in 2011, also does the voiceover narration in the 2025 film. 14 years later, wow! He should win an award for his impeccable narration. It gave me a real feel for Robert Grenier’s life.

Tinkers by Paul Harding / Bellevue / 192 pages / 2009

3 stars. This is a hard one to know what to think. It has some beautiful descriptive poetic writing to it, but the structure and piecemeal ramblings were a bit hard at times to follow and stay engaged. I’ve always wanted to read it since the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010 and is a deathbed story in which the character George reflects back on his life and father, which I thought I’d like, but it proved sort of tough to get through despite it being short.

The story follows George Crosby in the days before he dies and his memories from his childhood. It looks at George’s life as well as his father’s, Howard, who was a traveling peddler in 1920s Massachusetts. George fixes clocks for a living and Howard in a parallel narrative struggles with epileptic seizures. He bit George as a youngster which his wife commits him to a mental hospital for, but he later flees. George grows up pretty penniless but has an affinity for clocks, which there are some lyrical and metaphorical passages about.

I admired the author’s latest 2023 novel This Other Eden but Tinkers proved to be harder to fully engage with even though I was ready and willing.

That’s all for now. Have you read any of these — and if so, what did you think? Have a great week.

Hi Bookworms. I hope all is well. Does it feel like we’re racing through March or what? We’ve had much fluctuating weather here with windy 60s as well as falling temps and snowflakes too.

This weekend through Tuesday, I am busy reffing the U12 national tennis tournament here with a team of refs, so I will keep this a bit shorter than usual as I need to get to the site. The event is introducing electronic line calling this year with the benefit of players being able to challenge close line calls, which refs will check from a tablet at court side, so I hope this goes smoothly. We have 72 matches to get through today into the evening. And here you thought March Madness was all about basketball, lol. It’ll be a crazy amount of tennis.

Meanwhile here is my latest book haul that I picked up from the library.

• Brawler: Short Stories by Lauren Groff
• Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (novel)
• 107 Days by Kamala Haris (nonfiction)
• A Place of Tides by James Rebanks (nonfiction)

My husband has taken and is reading the Rebanks book, which is said to be about the author’s reflections on “a life-changing summer spent on a remote island off the coast of Norway, where his only companion was an old woman who practiced the ancient tradition of collecting eiderdown from birds that nest on this remarkable landscape each year.” Last year Tina at the blog Turn the Page had reviewed Rebanks’ two previous nonfiction books The Shepherd’s Life, and Pastoral Song … and I thought they sounded quite good so I picked up this latest one, which my husband will let me know about.

I’m not sure when I’ll get to the rest of these books as Tina and I plan to start a buddy read later in the week of the novel Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. It came out last fall and was a much talked about epic that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century. Many called it the book of the year last year — giving it 5 stars — so we can’t wait for this one. Carmen liked it a lot and tipped us off back when there was a $2.99 deal for the ebook on Amazon. Yay, it’s hard to get a recent much-awaited book cheap, but it’s good to be lucky once in a while.

In other book news, I see that it was announced that Jane Fonda will take on the role of Sybil Van Antwerp, the obsessive letter writer, in the movie adaptation of Virginia Evans’ bestselling novel The Correspondent. Wow Lionsgate snapped it up pretty quickly, but it’s still in the pre-production phase, so we will wait a bit. Also Liz Moore’s novel The God of the Woods will be coming to Netflix as an adapted TV series with Maya Hawke starring as investigator Judy Luptack … for those who liked the bestselling book. I had to look but yes, the actress is the daughter of Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman.

And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately:

Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild / St. Martin’s / 336 pages / 2025

3.75 stars. This debut novel by a British author came out last summer and I heard about it from Lesley at the blog Coastal Horizons. It’s one of those books you can’t say too much about its premise for fear of giving too much away. But basically it’s about a young-ish family who goes through a horrific tragedy at the start of the book … then you find out that the married couple was going through a surrogate for their second child at the time.

Four years later, Tom — the husband who survives — is raising the second child on his own with some help from his close friends … when he comes across a misaddressed letter that reveals the identity of his child’s egg donor. It’s what he does with this info — in his curiosity to meet the person — that becomes the gist of the story. It becomes a secret … that Tom doubles down on as it goes along.

I found it a good audio listen, though it seemed to go on a bit long for this type of story. I did want to strangle Tom at times as he makes plenty of bad decisions … you both sympathize with him and then are miffed by him. It’s told in alternating parts — with their lives before the tragedy … and then after the tragedy … with Tom’s dead spouse narrating the story. It makes it a bit unique though I came to want the parts in Tom’s present life to know how it plays out post-tragedy much more than the parts pre-tragedy. The story has a couple eye-rolls along the way — and whether you believe parts — still it kept me quite engaged for the duration and raises some interesting issues regarding surrogacy and parenthood.

That’s all for now. What about you — do you know about any of these books and if so, what did you think? Have a great week ahead everyone!

Hi all. How are you doing? March is going by rather quickly, eh? Though overall it’s felt like a very long winter. Will it ever end? I think it’s felt interminable in part because we haven’t gone to California like a snowbird this season due to my knee recovery and our old dog Stella who isn’t up for travels.

So here we’ve been like other Canadians not going south. And now with gas prices shooting up (due to the war) are people really traveling that much? We will hold off for a while. Meanwhile it’s been another cold week here, but it might hit the 60s this coming week! And in good luck, I saw this bald eagle (not a wild swan) sitting in one of our front trees. Baldy has been flying around lately and I’m glad he took a break to rest so I could spy on him for a while.

In book news this past week, I was sorry to see an obit in the NYT about the passing of author Dan Simmons, at age 77, who wrote an array of novels (more than 30!) that bordered between such genres as sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and historical fiction.

Perhaps his most well known was his 2007 novel The Terror that fictionalized the lost Arctic expedition of John Franklin’s in 1845 whose crew in the book is stalked across the landscape by an unusual monster. We enjoyed watching the adapted TV series on AppleTV+ that ran in 2018. It was good and eerie. Despite the sad loss of Simmons, thankfully his novels live on and there are many more to read.

Also this week I finished another nonfiction book with Jung Chang’s new memoir Fly, Wild Swans. I’m not sure why but my winter has involved more nonfiction than usual. Usually I’m a fiction nut true and blue, but lately a few memoirs and a couple histories (pictured below) have found their way into my reading. They’ve been excellent though they usually take me longer to read as I absorb all the facts. I’m just giving another spotlight to those here below along with a briefer description for those interested. They count for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge that I’m doing this year at Book’d Out.

A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton — 3.75 stars. Wharton was a fascinating, complex lady born in NYC and fluent in various languages. She was a gifted writer, an avid traveler, a dog lover, an adventurer, a gardener, and aide worker in WWI, and also very socially connected to her intellectual friends. I hoped to know all about her with this autobiography but much of it was lists of friends and acquaintances and little anecdotes mostly about her travels. She writes a lot about her friend author Henry James. Still there’s small nuggets of info I gleaned along the way: Edith’s years up until WWI, where all she lived, and how she started her literary career. There’s little about her husband but that his nose-diving health affected their lives together. She moved to France permanently after their divorce. It’s amazing all what she did, but reading a biography of her would likely be better.

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton — 5 stars. This lovely true story lured me in as it went on. You might not think too much towards the beginning with its history of hares and descriptive parts about the baby wild hare who the narrator comes to raise in the English countryside, but before you know it – the story becomes hard to put down as it pulls at your heartstrings. You get inside the author’s and hare’s transformation in their journey together. I very much enjoyed the audio version read superbly by Louise Brealey. In dark times, we need more people keen, observant, and caring as this woman becomes towards the hare and the natural world. The memoir is quiet dynamite.

The Typewriter and the Guillotine by Mark Braude — 4 stars. This is an interesting look into the life of journalist Janet Flanner who wrote the Letter from Paris column for The New Yorker starting in 1925 and focuses on her years in Paris in the run-up to WWII and after the war. I enjoyed finding out about her remarkable career and personal life story. She seemed a trailblazer of sorts in her work for the magazine. The other alternating aspect of the book describes the story of serial killer Eugen Weidmann who went on a terrible crime spree in 1937 and whose trial Flanner covered in 1939. The book gives good atmosphere into the period in Paris between WWI and WWII. You get a sense of the run-up to war in the 1930s, the rise of fascism, and what was happening during those dark, unstable days.

Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean — 4.5 stars. I’m an Orlean fan. I think it was her Library book and love of animals that sealed it for me over the years, and her candor too. This memoir about her life’s projects and writings interested and entertained me throughout. It made me laugh in parts too. I listened to Susan Orlean read the audiobook and liked hearing about her tips on nonfiction writing and the ins and outs of her career at publications like The New Yorker mixed in with her personal life. If you’ve been a journalism junkie in life, this is like catnip.

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself, and China by Jung Chang — 4.5 stars. This memoir is a worthy, admirable follow-up to her mega-bestselling memoir Wild Swans from 1991 and brought me up to date on her personal life story and her family’s in China from long ago till today. During the Cultural Revolution, Jung Chang lived to tell the tale of her parents (and her father’s and grandmother’s deaths) during those very dark days and later rose to distinction through her studies. She showed great courage leaving the country to study and live abroad in Britain and later to research and write her first memoir. Then later she wrote a biography of Mao (with her husband) all the while traveling back and forth to China. She does her utmost to get out the truth about what happened under the Maoists and her being under surveillance from the current regime. The memoir is also a moving portrait of her bonds with her mother and the role model her mother was and it’s a great tribute to her. I learned quite a bit from this book about China.

I was going to write a fuller review of Fly, Wild Swans but might do that next week. Time has gotten away from me today. If you follow the Academy Awards, they are on tonight. Enjoy the Red Carpet. I have not seen too many of the films, but I have seen Hamnet (4 stars), Marty Supreme (3 stars), Sinners (3.5 stars), and the pleasing Song Sung Blue (4 stars). Have you liked any of the nominated movies?

That’s all for now. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday and the week ahead and happy reading.

Hi all. Have you sprung your clocks forward? Argh, the time change always makes me feel out of step for a while, but I usually like Daylight Savings much better. Our neighbor province — British Columbia — is moving to having permanent Daylight Savings Time, so this will be its last time change. Lucky them. Apparently Arizona stays on Standard Time to conserve energy during the hot months. So it’s all about where you live. Meanwhile, all of our snow melted away last week under warm conditions … but now we’re having a full-on blizzard today, woohoo! The birds at the feeder are taking refuge. The rest of the week looks wintry too. So winter is returning for a bit. It’s supposed to officially end by March 20. But we’ll see. 

And now here (above) are the books I finished last month in February. In January I finished seven but in February just four. I’m going backwards. I think it’s because I was taking the Wharton class on The House of Mirth and we had to prepare to discuss for four Fridays. We went over passages aloud and I read the novel a couple times over. I liked all of these books pictured, so it’s hard to pick a favorite, but after all that I should go with The House of Mirth. 

• Crux by Gabriel Tallent was a buddy read with Tina (novel, hardback)
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (classic novel, ebook) 
• Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton (audiobook, nonfiction)
• The Typewriter and the Guillotine by Mark Braude (audiobook and hardback, finished twice) 

And now here is a photo (below) of my recent book loot I picked up from the library (and the Pip Williams novel that I recently bought at the airport, lol). I won’t get to these all in March, but I can get them back another time. Have you read any of these? 

• Kin by Tayari Jones (novel)
• Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang (nonfiction)
• The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (novel)
• Vigil by George Saunders (novel)
• A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter (nonfiction)
• Heart Be at Peace by Donal Ryan (novel)
• The Bookbinder by Pip Williams (novel)
• Cape Fever by Nadia Davids (novel)

Currently I’m reading Jung Chang’s memoir: Fly, Wild Swans, which is a recent follow-up to her first bestselling memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China from 1991. It’s quite a life story of her family’s survival during the Cultural Revolution and the years beyond.

I also borrowed the Elaine Showalter book (pictured above) since she was a guest lecturer at my last Edith Wharton class. She’s a literary expert and a former professor emeritus at Princeton University, so it was very cool to hear her speak about Wharton.  

And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately. Coincidentally both of these nonfiction books (below) feature two notable female writers who both wrote for the New Yorker magazine. Go figure. Also they count towards reads I’m doing this year for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge at Book’d Out.

Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean / Avid Reader / 368 pages / 2025

4.5 stars. As you might know, Susan Orlean has been a longtime nonfiction writer at the New Yorker magazine where she’s written many articles and profiles over the years on a wide variety of subjects, large and small, funny, quirky, and informative. Some became books that turned into movies like The Orchid Thief that became the movie Adaptation in 2002 and her surfer girl article was made into the movie Blue Crush in 2002.

She also wrote about Rin Tin Tin (2011), and her 2018 nonfiction The Library Book was a big hit. I saw her then at our book festival where she came to talk about it and I became a fan. She followed that with her On Animals collection in 2021, which also hooked me. Overall I can relate to her love of libraries, animals, and reading and writing.

So when her memoir came out last October, I knew I had to get to it. I listened to the audiobook version, which Orlean candidly reads. Much of the book is about her career as a writer: how she got started and went about her writing projects, as well as the publications and editors she worked for (like Tina Brown), and her subjects. Personally, she grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, with good parents and got a job after college in Portland, Oregon, at a local publication, doing music reviews for a while. But it wasn’t long before she was writing for national magazines like Rolling Stone. And in 1992, she became a staff writer at the New Yorker where she has been ever since.  

Her memoir moves chronologically and openly throughout her life and career, telling things as they happened … and describing how she went about writing, her ideas, and interviews along the way. It’s safe to say she’s been all over and written on a wide variety of topics: from life in NYC to gospel singers, basketball players, back packers in Asia, animals, and travel stories and everything in between. 

She’s often funny and entertaining … even if her books at times can be meandering and sprawling. I didn’t miss a beat of her memoir. If you’re interested in journalism, you’d probably like it … as most of it is about her career in the business and her ideas on writing. She mixes in her personal life as well. She’s been married twice and has one son. She once enjoyed living in N.Y.’s Hudson Valley with chickens and other animals before moving to a historical house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. And there she continues on at age 70, giving readers bits of wisdom and amusement with her written words … on things both large and small. 

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII by Mark Braude / 427 pages / 2026

3.75 stars. This nonfiction true story features an interesting brisk look into the life of Janet Flanner who was a correspondent for the New Yorker — writing the magazine’s Letter to Paris column — starting in 1925. It focuses on her years in Paris in the run-up to WWII in the 1930s … and thereafter during the war. I had not known about Flanner before, so I enjoyed finding out what she wrote and her gay personal life story. 

Flanner seemed a smart trailblazer of sorts in her work as a correspondent in Paris … along with her friend Ernest Hemingway. In addition to her Letter to Paris columns, which she signed Genet, she profiled Edith Wharton for the magazine in 1929, did a two-part profile on the Queen Mary in 1935, and then wrote a three-part profile on Adolph Hitler in 1936. 

Flanner was born in Indianapolis but wound up living in Paris, as a prominent member of America’s ex-patriate bohemian community. She lived with her longtime partner Solita Solano at the Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte, and later had another love interest, Noel Murphy, in the French countryside. (Her partners didn’t seem to mind about one another.) Flanner eventually left France in October 1939, out of Bordeaux and went by ship back to the U.S. She later returned once Paris was liberated in 1944 to write about the end of the war, including traveling to a couple of the concentration camps. 

An alternating part of the book, which introduces the reader to a serial killer — Eugen Weidmann and his story — is a bit bamboozling … but it seems to have coincided around the same time in Paris and apparently Janet Flanner wrote about his case. Eugen Weidmann was a petty criminal from Germany who crossed over the border into France after a time in prison. His crimes there started in 1937 when he kidnapped (and later killed) a 22-year-old American tourist girl who’d come to Paris. Along with a few accomplices he then went on a crime spree of murder that eventually ended when he got caught and later went on trial. Weidmann seemed an unremorseful killer, whose crimes — apparently for money — were brutal and disturbing. 

The combined narratives about Flanner and Weidmann make for a pretty revelatory account of pre-WWII Europe, providing plenty of atmosphere  overseas between WWI and WWII. You get a sense of the run up to war in the 1930s — with Flanner’s exposes on the 1936 Olympics, the 1937 World’s Fair, and her frequent travels to Germany — and the rise of fascism, and what people were thinking and dreading. There are some parallels with today that I couldn’t help but notice. Flanner had quite the life and career. Apparently she didn’t retire until 1975, after nearly a half-century chronicling European life.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these pictured and what did you think?  

Hi all. We were busy watching the Olympic hockey game early this morning. It was crazy … but great action which required a lot of yelling and agony on my part, lol. All in all, we enjoyed streaming quite a bit of the Olympics, including much of the biathlon, figure skating, ice dancing, and hockey … as well as some of the other sports. It was a good distraction no doubt … from all the news crises going on, the latest being possible war in the Middle East. I’m sure the State of the Union address this week will be one big sham of untruths. But in the midst of this, we had a good family reunion trip to Vancouver, B.C. this past week. And for one sunny afternoon, we were even able to bike the Seawall and shoreline bike paths. This was quite a treat! You don’t get many sunny days in Vancouver in the winter, so we took full advantage of it … and it was beautiful … albeit around 36 degrees F.  

We arrived back home just in time for my fourth and final Zoom class on Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Each class was two+ hours long and we were full on discussing passages as we went on. It was great. I must have read the full novel like two or three times over the past month as I prepared for each class, lol. It’s a bit of a long novel too … with various layers to it, but I was in its grip. See the review down below. 

Meanwhile another classic novel — Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights — is playing as an adapted movie at the theater in town now, and we might see it though this adaptation has received various up and down reviews, many quite terrible about how it’s not faithful to the novel etc. We will keep that in mind. Still it is spurring on new readers to the book. Maybe even I will be lured back to the days of Catherine and Heathcliff. It’s been a long while … and I find with classics you need to reread them after a decade or two goes by.

And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished recently.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton / Scribner / 1905 

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

5 stars. This is the story of Lily Bart, a 29-year-old New York socialite at the turn of the century whose parents become financially ruined and died when she was 19/20 leaving her with very little, other than an aunt who took her in. The aunt gives her some allowances but it’s not enough for the dresses and luxuries Lily requires … or for the bridge gambling she dabbles in among her rich friends.

Mostly what Lily has going for her is her incredible beauty and pretty face and she needs to marry to secure her status in high society and any future, but she’s let her early opportunities go, back when she debuted as a debutante.

Now she’s at the brink of turning 30 and sees only boring or distasteful prospects in her sights. Her friend, Selden, is a man she admires but he’s not wealthy enough for her.  So she gets a bit desperate and gives some money to her friend’s husband to invest in the stock market, but this turns into an entanglement she comes to regret … along with another entanglement with the heiress Bertha Dorset, who invites her to stay on her yacht during a trip to Monte Carlo and the Mediterranean.  

Poor Lily. Her reputation takes a beating from schemes concocted by this nemesis. You hope upon hope Lily can restore herself and rise above her entanglements … as she has a good sense of honor about her. And there are a couple options (not many for a woman like her) and friends — Gerty Farish, Carry Fisher, and Selden who try to help her but somehow despite Lily’s beauty and capabilities, it’s a spiral she faces that you wouldn’t wish on anyone. 

I got caught up in this debut novel as there’s turns and nuances along the way and many good passages about Lily. It’s sort of like a soap opera at times … but more since Wharton is a talented writer who’s able to weave a tale so tellingly and satirically about the times and high society in Lily’s milieu. It’s not as streamlined as Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, but you come to feel for Lily, who’s a sympathetic protagonist even if born into a snobby existence. Near the end she comes to see those downtrodden whom she once gave charity to better — like Nettie Struther, a mother with a baby out of wedlock who survived her situation and found a partner.

I continue to be a big fan of Wharton’s (she even was a dog lover, see photo at left) and will read more of her in the future. Though my class’s instructor didn’t like The Custom of the Country (1913) as much as The House of Mirth since he found the protagonist less likable.

Still as Lesley at the blog Coastal Horizons told me: The Custom of the Country is going to be adapted into a new movie with Sydney Sweeney and Leo Woodall — who were both in The White Lotus, lol. I will have to read it before then and see it … but first here is one more line below from near the end of The House of Mirth whose protagonist — Lily Bart — I won’t forget anytime soon. 

“She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.”

Poor Lily. That’s all for now. What about you — have you read Wharton and if so, what did you think? 

Hi Bookworms. It’s mid-February already. I hope you all had a lovely Valentine’s Day yesterday. We went out to dinner, which was nice. And lately we’ve been watching the Olympics. It’s been good streaming it without the commercials.

We’ve watched plenty of action, everything from the downhill skiing, to the biathlon, and hockey games, to the moguls skiing, and figure skating. I’m not sure which has stood out to me the most so far, but the ice dancing competition was quite alluring and close and the Canadian couple of Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier skated so beautifully to a program using the song “Starry Starry Night” to take Bronze. So pleased for them! They’d been skating together apparently since 2011. I wonder a bit what made them choose the folksy, soupy Don McLean song from 1971, but wow they took it to another level, lol.

This coming week we’ll be going to Vancouver, B.C. for a family reunion, so I’m excited about that. We haven’t traveled in a long while. It’s a lovely city and we’ll walk around lots and maybe visit a couple bookstores too. Meanwhile our doggies will be home so I hope they’ll be good with the sitter. Here is Willow looking mellow now, lol.

I’ll be taking a couple books I have going including Edith Wharton’s 1905 classic The House of Mirth (for my Politics & Prose class) and a nonfiction book by Mark Braude titled The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII. Quite a title right? I had not known about its subjects before — Janet Flanner of the New Yorker and a man named Eugen Weidmann who was a con man and a killer apparently. We will see what happens. 

And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately. 

Crux by Gabriel Tallent / Riverhead / 416 pages / 2026

4.0+ stars. This novel — about two high school best friends Dan and Tamma, who have family strife in their lives and share a love of rock climbing — was a buddy read with Tina over at the blog Turn the Page. It’s a bit jarring at first with its foul teenage language especially from the girl Tamma, but as it went on and I adjusted, I was drawn into their story more and more. 

Dan and Tamma have grown up in the desert, not far from Joshua Tree National Park, where they like to rock climb steep boulders and peaks. It’s their last year of high school and they’re dreaming up plans of taking off after school becoming dirtbaggers, living and climbing in Utah’s Canyonlands.

Dan is a smart honor student type, and Tamma is an outcast, gay and like a firecracker. Their families are poor and busted and they have a lot of baggage, so you don’t know what will happen to Dan and Tamma and their future. Dan’s parents are hoping he can win a scholarship to college. But Dan and Tamma spend most their time just trying to keep their families going and to be able to climb together. 

Climbing is their one happy place and they’re the only ones who have each other’s backs. Their families and mothers are particularly bad — one has a drug problem and the other severe depression and a heart defect without any insurance. By and by, you come to root for Dan and Tamma with no money to find a way to rise above their situations. Will they be able to live their dreams? This is a gritty novel that navigates lives on the line that lured me with its two main characters and their pact together, which you’re unsure of whether it’ll hold.

Others on Goodreads have warned that this novel has a lot of rock climbing and jargon to it. I actually liked these parts. Some is descriptive and beautiful and the rock climbing to me came to be compelling … even though I don’t know much about the sport. There are a couple boulder plateaus in the desert the two characters attempt to scale that are scary and make for good action. It’s all a part of their journey during that fateful last year of high school.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you seen this one and what do you think? Enjoy your week. And happy reading.

Hi Bookworms, it was another tough week in news so I hope you’re hanging in there. As you can see the snow here has melted away and the fields are brown now. It’s awfully mild out West for February.

But things are gearing up with the Olympics on and it being Super Bowl Sunday. Will you be going to a S.B. party? I’ll likely be home and will watch sporadically from the couch … along with reading and checking in on the skating and skiing from the Olympics. Neither NFL team is a favorite, but there’s always the spectacle of the halftime show. 

Meanwhile you might have heard this past week the terrible news about the major layoffs at The Washington Post. Three hundred+ people were let go and the Book and Sports sections were discontinued along with various foreign bureaus. I once worked at this reputable newspaper, which was then owned by the Graham family. It was an impressive place with many great journalists. I worked there as a copy editor and left in November 2010. 

Jeff Bezos bought The Post in 2013 and has now gutted it … while recently his Amazon company spent $75 million in the making and promoting of the “Melania” documentary … all to cozy up to the current regime. It’s quite a blow to those who worked good portions of their careers at the paper as well as to its loyal readers and to democracy in general. Disturbingly, a free press is the first thing to go under a tyranny. It’s made me think back to those days in the 1990s and early 2000s when I was at The Post … and to the late Mrs. Graham who gave so much to the newspaper that published many important stories. I loved her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, which came out in 1997. 

And now, here’s the books I completed in January. It seems my reading benefited from it being a long month in the middle of winter with a bum recovering knee so I was on the couch more than usual. I pretty much liked all of these so it’s hard to say which was my favorite but I was especially pleased to have finished Shannon Bowring’s trilogy (with Tina at Turn the Page) and Edith Wharton’s autobiography written in 1934. So here they are in the last order finished:

• Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen (debut, hardback)
• The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O’Neill (debut, audiobook)
• In a Distant Valley by Shannon Bowring (audiobook, #3 in trilogy)
• The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten (paperback, translated)
• A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton (ebook, nonfiction) 
• The Wedding People by Alison Espach (audiobook) 
• When the Cranes Fly South (paperback, debut, translated) 

Lastly, here are a couple reviews below of what I finished lately. 

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton / Pantheon / 285 pages / 2025

This is my first 5 star book in a while. It might not be that for every reader but I’m sensitive to good animal stories and this nonfiction memoir was one of them. Although other bloggers had mentioned positive things about the book (thanks Deb at Readerbuzz), I didn’t really have any assumptions going into it. 

It has a straightforward premise about a woman, living in the countryside outside of London during the pandemic days who finds a wild newborn hare — a leveret apparently abandoned near her home. She thinks it will die so she takes to caring and feeding it. She lets it be wild and run in and out of her house into a courtyard garden. In raising it, she learns much in the process, and her and the hare go through a journey of sorts together. It’s a rare connection she gets to have with the hare and something you don’t see everyday. 

At the book’s beginning it seems to offload a lot of descriptive information about the particulars of hares and all the dangers to them and I didn’t think too much about the book for a while. The author seems to have a high powered job as a political adviser and she thinks she doesn’t have the time or know one thing about such animals. She’s avid about her job and doesn’t know how or if caring for the leveret is going to work out. 

But as it goes on, her story sneaks up on you when after a couple cool things happen, you realize the trust and endearing magic of the cool connection she’s having to this wild animal. It pulls at the heartstrings a bit and I felt weepy in parts. Along the way, the author and hare go through a transformation of sorts — the author learning and becoming more keen to the natural world, and the hare becoming bigger and more sure of itself.

I very much enjoyed the audio version read superbly by British actress Louise Brealey. By the end, this lovely story had its hooks (or paws?) in me. In dark times, we need more people keen and observant and caring as this woman becomes towards the hare and the natural world. It’s quiet dynamite.

* This memoir is part of my Nonfiction Reader Challenge hosted by Book’d Out.

Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen / St. Martin’s / 288 pages / 2025

3.75 stars. This novel is an engaging coming-of-age kind of read about 26-year-old Cricket Campbell who leaves her life and job as an assistant at a Wellness company in NYC to return home and be her Dad’s caretaker in the Adirondacks. She hasn’t seen him in about nine years ever since she left at 16 when her boyfriend (Seth) was in an accident near their house and her parents divorced, which together left her reeling and later to drop out of college. 

Now she wants to reconcile with her 74-year-old father, but he has Alzheimer’s and it seems futile. Still moving back home to Catwalk Pond has its enjoyments amid nature and new friends, and she feels a purpose helping her father in his own rural environs. While there, she comes to believe that her father may be a bit clairvoyant about things that will happen and also able to see ghosts. How this plays out for Cricket and those who come to seek her father’s advice is engaging to follow through to the end. 

The novel spoke to me a bit in remembering the care with my own parents. It’s an endearing story and set in a beautiful Adirondack location. You root for the protagonist Cricket — who’s riddled with guilt over her parents divorce and her teenage boyfriend’s accident— to find herself and give her purpose and the confidence to find what’s she wants to do with her life. It paints a picture of her dad’s Alzheimer’s that rings true but isn’t overly too harsh to read. Still it’s a bit sad though the resolution is satisfying. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these and what did you think?