N is for …. Norbert
🐢
Norbert the most handsome Redfoot Tortoise.
N has very good variety, Romance, True Crime, Fantasy, Espionage, etc.
Nicholas Sparks is always a winner. The Notebook is probably my favorite. It is in my opinion the definition of love. Dont we all want someone to love us that much?
There are more books here that I haven’t read than have but I am looking forward to getting to them.
Living in northern Idaho, summer time here means wild fire season. And this year is no different, I am currently surrounded by fires, one is only about 5 miles from my house. We had a horrible wind storm on Monday which caused massive damage and downed powerlines. These powerlines caused a record 58 wild fires. Living in a constant state of alertness, to be prepared in the event of evacuation, smoke filling the air. Its a scary place to be right now.
A book about Smoke Jumpers seems fitting to read now.
🔥
Blurb: His name is Connor Ford and he falls like an angel of mercy from the sky, braving the flames to save the woman he loves but knows he cannot have. For Julia Bishop is the partner of his best friend and fellow “smoke jumper,” Ed Tully. Julia loves them both–until a fiery tragedy on Montana’s Snake Mountain forces her to choose between them, and burns a brand on all their hearts.
In the wake of the fire, Connor embarks on a harrowing journey to the edge of human experience, traveling the world’s worst wars and disasters to take photographs that find him fame but never happiness. Reckless of a life he no longer wants, again and again he dares death to take him, until another fateful day on another continent, he must walk through fire once more…
7 Books
1,292 pages
29 HR 29 Min
Average Rating 3.7
🎧Of Mice and Men 🌟🌟🌟
Another Time 🌟🌟
Gilchrist 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
🎧A Tale of Two Cities 🌟🌟🌟
🎧The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 🌟🌟🌟
Strawberry Shortcake Murder 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
August was a great month for me. I felt rejuvenated! A whole new energy and I was able to get a lot of reading in. I had a lot of inventory to do at work so it was a great opportunity to get some audio books done too. I figured I would start with my 100 books to read in a Lifetime list and found the ones my library had on audio to download. I knew that reading some of the classics would be tough so I figured audio would be best.
My stand out of the month is Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, this book has moved me and will stay apart of me forever. It is so beautifully written, poetic storytelling. A story full of strength and such insight that really resonated with me.
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Memoir, An Advanced Reader’s Edition
“Nearly thirty years after my mother’s death I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered.”
Natasha shares her experiences of growing up in Mississippi as a mixed race child in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The wonderful stories of living around her grandma, aunts, and uncles. The ways that they helped shape her with their stories and metaphors.
After her parent’s divorce, her and her mother move to Atlanta. Natasha speaks about the trauma during these years with a new step father that she had tried to block out.
“For a long time I tried to forget as much as I could of the twelve years between 1973 and 1985. I wanted to banish that part of my past, an act of self-creation by which I sought to be made only of what I consciously chose to remember.” “Those two years would be like the set of bookends I’d kept on my desk back then…” “The years 1973 and 1985, side by side, with no books between them, no pages upon which the story I could not bear to remember had been written. But there is a danger in willed forgetting; too much can be lost. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I needed to most. Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly. Even when I was trying to bury the past, there were moments from those lost years that kept coming back, rising to mind unbidden. Those memories — some intrusive, some lovely — seem now to have a grander significance, like signposts on a path.”
M is for …. Macbeth
M is every genre and for everyone. We have a bit of everything here…thrillers, horror, romance, true crime, and more.
I have always been a big Shakespeare fan. Pretty much it all started with Romeo and Juliet when I was required to read it in the 8th grade. Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite but I have not been able to find a copy yet.
Macbeth is a classic and probably the most popular. I picked up Jo Nesbo’s rendition a few years ago at a library sale. It is so good! A modern spin that worked excellent! If you haven’t read it, you should.
I recently received this memoir and I am so looking forward to reading it. Thank you Ecco Books for sending me this copy.
Blurb: A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.
With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.
Strawberry Shortcake Murder by Joanne Fluke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Cozy Murder Mystery, Amateur Sleuth
“An icy wind had kicked up, and the metal walls of the truck creaked and groaned with each gust. She wasn’t the type to be frightened at nothing, but Hannah couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if the killer had found out that she was searching Ruby’s outtakes for the sight of his cuff links.”
Hannah Swenson, baker and owner of The Cookie Jar, has been chosen as head judge for the first annual Hartland Flour Dessert Bake Off competition. In order to boost ratings, they have asked Hannah to bake a dessert on camera during the news every night before the competition as well. After the first night, fellow judge, Coach Boyd Watson was not making any friends. He has a good pallet but could use some tact.
“But feelings have no place in a competition like this. Either you win or you don’t. There’s no sense in sugarcoating it. If you don’t come in first, you’re a loser.”
When Boyd turns up dead in his garage that night, murdered from a blow to the head with a hammer from his own workbench, it seems like maybe someone else doesn’t like him either. Could it have to do with his judging on the competition or something else?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, narrated by Eric Dove
10 HR 20 min
Adventures that all little boys only dream of! No matter what society deems right or what adults tell him do, in the end Huck always does what his heart tells him is right to do.
Goodreads: Following the events of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn is under the watchful stewardship of the Widow Douglas. However, when he is forced back into his drunken father’s custody, Buck fakes his own death and runs off down the river. In the process, he meets up with Jim, a runaway slave, anf the two become friends as well as travel companions. Their adventures lead them through many twists and turns through the American South, embarking on a legendary journey.
🍓Hannah’s back with more receipes and murders! I am so excited! I love this series so much. It is so cute, light, and a breeze to read through. The reciepes add so much fun to the reading and I have even tried a few of them myself.
Goodreads: When the president of Hartland Flour chooses cozy Lake Eden, Minnesota, as the spot for their first annual Dessert Bake-Off, Hannah is thrilled to serve as the head judge. But when a fellow judge, Coach Boyd Watson, is found stone-cold dead, facedown in Hannah’s celebrated strawberry shortcake, Lake Eden’s sweet ride to fame turns very sour indeed.
Between perfecting her Cheddar Cheese Apple Pie and Chocolate Crunchies, Hannah’s snooping into the coach’s private life and not coming up short on suspects. And could Watson’s harsh criticism during the judging have given one of the contestants a license to kill? The stakes are rising faster than dough, and Hannah will have to be very careful, because somebody is cooking up a recipe for murder…with Hannah landing on the “necessary ingredients” list.
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens, narrated by Simon Prebble
16 HR 9 min
These classics are killing me! Is it a requirement for a classic to be a tear jerker?! 😢
During the French Revolution, some used “the cause” for their own personal revenge.
Goodreads: When the starving French masses rise to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and the innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the chilling figure they enlist for their cause La Guillotine, the new invention for efficiently chopping off heads.
