Review: THE CORRESPONDENT (+Friday56 LinkUp)

Title: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Book Beginning/First Line Quote:

Felix, my dear brother,

Thank you for the birthday card, the fountain pen, and the book, which I started the day it arrived (Thursday) and finished today.

Friday56 quote:

Dear Sir or Madam:

SHAME ON YOU. I am writing in regards to the article printed on page 2 of the Life section this morning, June 10, 2013, regarding the death of a young girl in Timonium.

Summary: 

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness. (Publisher)

Review: The Correspondent is one of those books I meant to read in 2025 because everyone was raving about it here on the blogosphere. I got in line for it at the library and was over 1000 places back. When we selected it for book club, I worried I would have to purchase it to read it on time -- and I really don't like buying books I can check out from the library. So when I finally got my turn, I was ready to relish the book. I was prepared for the style -- epistolary -- with the whole story being told through letters, emails, and notes. What I wasn't prepared for was a very crabby, inflexible main character -- Sybil, the writer of the letters. You get a taste of this crabbiness in the quote for Friday56 above. I always struggle with books where I don't like the main characters, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I struggled with this book. To be fair, Sybil does make progress and actually makes amends for her wrong-doings late in the book. So we know a good person was inside, it was just hard to see that for most of the story.

Crabby old woman aside, I did like the epistolary style, finding it very easy to read. It made the reader responsible for filling in the blanks, since often letters aren't answered or not in a timely manner. If Sybil didn't write about an event she mentioned in one letter to someone, we had no idea what happened. For example, she traveled to Texas to visit a possible love interest. But Sybil wrote no letters about her experiences there. It wasn't until many letters later that a few details of the trip dribbled out.

Based on this review, it will surprise you that I rated the book with 4 stars. Sybil made growth, the writing style was fun and easy to read. Plus I cried at the end because at the heart of the story is a dead child, deep grief, and crippling guilt. Did you read it? What did you think?

_______________________________________________

Sign up for The Friday56 on the Inlinkz below. 

RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your e-reader (If you want to improvise, go ahead!)

*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

*Post it to your blog and add your url to the Linky below. If you do not add the specific url for your post, we may miss it! 

*Visit other blogs and leave comments about their snippets. Expand the community. Please leave a comment for me, too!  

Also visit Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader and First Line Friday hosted by Reading is My Super Power to share the beginning quote from your book.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

-Anne

TTT: Bookish-related events of 2025

Top Ten Tuesday: My favorite bookish-related events of 2025

In no particular order:

1. Discussing All My Knotted-Up Life: a Memoir by Beth Moore with my sister-in-law, Becky. She and I do not share the same taste in books so it was fun to find one we were both passionate about.

2. Going to new bookstores in my own town. We've lived in a book desert for around ten years, ever since Borders Books closed in the mid 2010s. This year my community got three bookstores in one year. Feast or famine.

3. While attending my 50-year high school reunion, I overheard one classmate asking another classmate if she'd read my blog and then she called me the Book Lady. Ha! I didn't even know the first gal was a reader of my blog.

4. While on a whole-family vacation it was such a treat to hear my daughter read bedtime stories to our grandchildren. Books are important in their home, too.

5. Visiting the "library" at the retirement home where my Mom now lives. She is so proud of their little library which is well stocked and well kept. One point, however, they shelf all the books by author instead of segregating fiction from nonfiction. They are all jumbled together. Picky-picky.

6. Starting "Audiobooks with Don" this year. My husband willingly listens to audiobooks with me when we take road trips. This year I made it official and included his thoughts and opinions in my reviews. It has been a fun exercise for both of us. Today I completed a new "Audiobook with Don" review of Mother Mary Comes to Me. Please visit the link so you can see how we do as co-reviewers.

7. My SOTH book club has been meeting since 1995 and we are still going strong thirty years later. We get a kit of books/discussion guide from the library so no one has to spend money on books. This year the library changed the rules on placing holds on the kits and it was topsy-turvy for a while until we settled into a new routine. The favorite book we read this past year was The Book of Lost Names. It is a WWII story told in France about how forgers help get Jewish children smuggled out of the country to safety and how they kept track of who was who by codes hidden within books. 

8. At a end-of-the-year meeting I was given a gift for serving as a leader at our church for six years and was now going off the board. The pastor gave me a gift of book and book counter as a gift. I didn't need anything. It was an honor to serve, but I thought the gift very thoughtful. See photo above.

9. The annual reading of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss is always an event. It also reminds me of my Dad, now gone, who always read it with relish, using for silly voices.

10. My second book club is made up of teachers and retired teachers. We all worked together at RHS at one time. We meet once a month and always have a such a good time catching up on our lives and the lives of our old colleagues. Sometimes the news we share is sad, like the death of beloved teacher or administrator. This group's favorite book of the year was James by Percival Everett. We had the most hilarious discussion over the book Names by Florence Knapp. It has three storylines running concurrently and we kept getting mixed up on the details. It became ridiculous.

-Anne

Nonfiction review: MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Scribner, September 2025.

Arundhati Roy's memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, tackles her writing career, India's turbulent politics, and a reckoning with her larger-than-life mother, Mary Roy. It covers the author's rocky childhood, her break from her mother and life as an architecture student, the stardom that followed the publishing of her first book, The God of Small Things, and finally how she settled into her role as a reporter and activist for social justice causes all around her beloved India and how she reunited with her mother.

I became a Roy fan back in 1997 after I read The God of Small Things. The story, about two young twins and the caste system in India, captured my imagination. The book won the Booker Prize that year and catapulted Roy into instant fame. Everyone read her book. Everyone wanted another, including me. We were all in for a long wait since she didn't publish another fiction novel for twenty years. When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was published in 2017, I remember reading an article about what Roy had been up to in the intervening years. She'd turned her attention from fiction to all kinds of people's movements throughout her country. All of her passions are included in the book: displaced villagers, Indian occupation of Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Maoist insurgents. Her second novel was a lot. With explanations of multiple causes and two main storylines curling around each other, all set in an exotic land (to us) on the other side of the world, few women in book club had patience for this book. But I did. I loved Utmost Happiness as much or more than Small Things. I felt like I WAS in India, the writing was so descriptive. 

My husband, who listened to the Mother Mary audiobook with me, commented the book should have been not just Arundhati's memoir but her mother's, too. We figured out that was the point. Mary Roy was such a dominating figure in the author's life that their stories were all tangled up together. Mary, who started a school for girls in their village, Ayemenem, ruled the campus as the queen bee. But whenever she got frustrated by one of her students she would take that frustration out on her daughter or son, not the offending student. Arundhati could never seem to escape her mother's wrath, even when she was a model student. 

Arundhati recounts that after publishing her first book, Mary saw herself as the protagonist in the story. In one scene the twins are being shoved back and forth from one parent to the other with one parent saying, "You take them, I don't want them." Mary wondered how Arundhati remembered that from her childhood. Arundhati said she thought it was fiction and didn't remember such a thing happening to her, but it actually had. She had internalized this ambivalence her mother felt toward her from the beginning.

After the dust settled from the fame that followed winning the Booker Prize, Roy decided to see where life would take her, instead of sitting down and trying to write another novel. She found herself in all corners of India -- trying to help villagers who were doomed to lose their ancestral homes from the flooding caused by a huge dam project; marching around the jungle with Maoist insurgents; nearly getting shot in Kashmir. She spent a night in jail on a contempt of court charge because she wouldn't apologize after being cited for criticizing a judicial ruling and leading a demonstration at the supreme court. Whenever she would talk about differences between gender roles and expectations she would repeat a line said to her earlier -- "Because it is India, my dear." Roy, who narrated the audiobook, said this phrase with such an affected, snobby accent, Don and I found ourselves laughing and repeating the phrase every time we'd hear it.

In December of each year I attempt to uncover the best 50 books published that year by doing a "Best Books Roundup." This past year, 2025, Mother Mary Comes to Me was at the top of my list. (See list here.) This surprised me because it is nonfiction and delighted me because I've loved Roy's novels so much. I immediately added the book to my TBR. When the audiobook came available from the library I invited my husband to join me in listening to it. Now he is a fan of the author, also. Listening to Roy narrate her own life's story was such a treat. The story is so wrapped up in the setting it was appropriate to have the story read by an Indian and why not the author? Now Don wants to read her fiction, once again using the audiobook format. If you haven't read any books by Arundhati Roy, I recommend you start here with this memoir. Her novels are very complex and knowing their back story will likely help you understand aspects of each novel's complexity.

Both Don and I rated the book with 5 stars.

-Anne

Sunday Salon --- Minnesota!

Standing up against tyranny in Minneapolis. Photo: Reuters.

Weather: Cold and clear. Look at a weather map of the US. We are in the part with regular cold weather, but not the extreme cold and snow. Right now it is sunny but it won't get above the 30s today.

Minnesota: My heart is with those in Minnesota who are fighting for humanity. Here I sit comfortably in my warm house and can look outside on a calm environment. Minnesotans, particularly Minneapolitans,  are out in the bitterly cold weather right now fighting for our whole country against the authoritarian activities of the ICE agents. Some have put their lives on the line, with another person being murdered just yesterday. (CNN) As I pondered how I could help, the thought occurred to me maybe I could do something through my Presbyterian denomination. I found an article "A Church at the Center of the Crisis Speaks." The church is Westminster Presbyterian in Minneapolis. They made a statement of faith which really moves me. (Read it all on the above link,) Here are a few highlights:

• Those who are, and have been, exercising their right to support, observe, protest, and peacefully assemble are also being subjected to harm by government actions. We believe these actions are motivated and informed by white Christian nationalism in our country and its influence on our federal government’s elected officials. We believe white Christian nationalism furthers the sins of systemic racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism in the United States, and carries assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and militarism. It threatens the very core of our democracy. It is counter to God’s hope for the world and how God seeks for us to make our life together.
• Jesus teaches us through Scripture to love our neighbors as ourselves, with no exceptions. We commit ourselves to the way of Christ—nonviolent and courageous love, especially toward those most at risk. We proclaim a God who values the full humanity and inherent dignity of all people.

Today I commit: to take action within my congregation to send support to our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis and to work with those who have a larger megaphone than I do to spread the word, to try and activate other congregations to join us. If no one is moved, I will lend my support alone. 

Now I urge you: to find out what your church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or other community centers are doing to end the trouble with ICE and how you can send financial or physical support. Figure it out and publish your actions on your blog. It is time for us behind the scenes book-bloggers to get activated! We can't sit this one out. 

A declarative statement: I am a Christian. I believe that God loves me and you, and you, and you. He calls me to love my neighbors as myself. No one falls outside God's love, so if something happens to my Hispanic, Black, Native American, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ, or immigrant neighbor, it happens to me. If I can do something to help, I will! 

I’m done trusting in what’s sinking
These boats weren’t built for me
I’m done drifting on the water of insecurity
In the noise and the distractions
In the storms of arguing
I hear Your voice callin’
And I’m gonna fix my eyes on Jesus
Walking with the One who walks on the sea.

Lyrics: "Wherever You Lead."

Laugh or Cry? Cry/Cringe while laughing?

It sure seems like this is who they are hiring for ICE.

This is not funny. It is frightening.

Amen!

Sometimes the only news I can stand is from the comedy channels. This SNL segment of Weekend Update features Tony Brennan on Trump's ICE Deployments in Minnesota.

For those of you who know the Hamilton musical. King George singing "You'll Be Back". First verse: "I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love."  And the the second verse: "I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love."

I will update what I am reading tomorrow and will post on: It's Monday. What Are You Reading.

Stand up. Speak up. Do what you can!

-Anne

Review: SO FAR GONE

Title: So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Book Beginning/ First Line Friday quote:

A prim girl stood still as a fencepost on Rhys Kinnick's front porch. Next to her, a cowlicked boy shifted his weight from one snow boot to the other snow boot. Both kids wore backpacks. On the stairs below them, a woman held an umbrella against the pattering rain.

Friday56 quote: 

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every hurricane, firestorm, melting ice cap a local disaster, the seas boiling up around them, every cynical politician and legal maneuver part of the same rotten fabric -- and half the country somehow seeing it exactly the opposite way.

Summary: Seven years after a fight with his son-in-law, which caused Rhys Kinnick to move to a cabin in the woods off the grid, his grandchildren show up on his doorstep. Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing is not exactly the type of place to raise children, but he is determined to try. He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids.

But when the militia members, from the group the father is mixed up with, show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the world (and get a cell phone.) With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind to rescue the kids and locate his daughter, their mother.

Review: My first book of 2026, Worth Fighting For, was a serious collection of essays about how Christian Naturalists are warping Christianity and what concerned folks, like me, can do about it. As I read through the essays I got more and more weighted down by the increasing realization of how bad things are in our country. By book's end I wanted to go to bed and pull a blanket over my head. Something which was meant to be helpful made me more discouraged than ever. 

Next I picked up a fiction book by a favorite author, Jess Walter, called So Far Gone. Within a few pages I realized that Christian Nationalists also populated the pages of this book but every time the topic was mentioned I found myself laughing. Jess Walter has a way of making his readers laugh, rather than cry, at the absurdities of our current situations. 

So Far Gone is set mainly in Eastern Washington around the city of Spokane, where Walter lives. The Christian Nationalist's compound is set in the panhandle of Northern Idaho, right across the stateline. Nearby in the NE part of the state is the Spokane Indian Reservation, where another part of the story takes place. One of the reasons I enjoy reading Jess Walter books is because he always sets them in my state, often mentioning places I've visited. 

The main character, Rhys Kinnick, was a journalist writing for the Spokane newspaper focusing on environmental issues. As the newspaper downsized, Kinnick lost his job and his identity. Instead of sticking around and trying his hand at something else, he retires to a cabin in the woods built his grandfather and does little to improve it and he completely unhooks himself from technology which he views with skepticism (see quote from Friday56). Living in such isolation seemed good at first, perhaps Rhys would finally find time to write the book he has been researching for years. But the isolation grows to the point Rhys is almost a hermit, even losing touch with his only daughter and grandchildren, until that fateful day when they show up on his porch steps. Walter knows what he is writing about since he began his writing career as a journalist, writing for the Spokane-Review newspaper. In an interview about this book, Walter said being a journalist "made me more outward-looking than I would have been otherwise. Journalism allowed me to look at systems and institutions, and to now take fictional characters and put them into worlds that I covered as a reporter. So, for me, I think it really opened my eyes to what my fiction should be about."  As a reporter he covered the Ruby Ridge Standoff, also in Idaho, in 1992.  He certainly brought a journalist's eyes and skills as he crafted this story.

So Far Gone is full of dark humor which propelled the story through its darker parts. Since I've read several of Walters other books --Citizen Vince, Cold Millions, Beautiful Ruins, The Financial Lives of Poets -- I knew this about his books. I also knew that nothing terrible, terrible would likely happen. Good. What a relief. Humor without horror. There is enough "terrible, terrible" in the world right now without having to confront it on the pages of books, too. Don listened to the audiobook with me. It was narrated by Wil Patton, another favorite. Don was completely invested in the story. I think he laughed harder than I did and he clearly admired Walter's writing style. Both of us remarked how refreshing it is to read a book set in our state. (Apparently, this is theme in our family! Ha) We talked a lot about the way fiction can often have a bigger impact on readers than nonfiction, perhaps because the packaging makes the bad news more palatable -- as So Far Gone did for me compared the book of essays on a similar topic.

Here is one of the funniest quotes I remember from the book. Don and I both thought it was so funny, we had to rewind the audiobook to hear a few more times before we were ready to move on and then we kept repeating it to each other for the rest of the day:

“As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.”

So Far Gone has it all -- great writing; vivid settings; a mystery (where is the daughter?); quirky characters; timely satire about socio-political, religious, environmental, and technological issues; dark humor, and a unique plot. Don and I both recommend this book to you. 

We both rated the book -- 5 stars.

_______________________________________________

Sign up for The Friday56 on the Inlinkz below. 

RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your e-reader (If you want to improvise, go ahead!)

*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

*Post it to your blog and add your url to the Linky below. If you do not add the specific url for your post, we may miss it! 

*Visit other blogs and leave comments about their snippets. Expand the community. Please leave a comment for me, too!  

Also visit Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader and First Line Friday hosted by Reading is My Super Power to share the beginning quote from your book.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

-Anne

Nonfiction Review: ALL MY KNOTTED-UP LIFE: A MEMOIR (+Discussion Questions)

All My Knotted Up Life: a Memoir by Beth Moore

Tyndale Momentum, 2023. 304 pages.

Many years ago the Women's Bible Study at church used a video series by Beth Moore and her organization, Living Proof Ministries. Every woman in our group really enjoyed the study, especially the video portion where Beth was filmed speaking to a group of women on Ephesians, a New Testament book of the Bible. I thought she was incredibly warm, personable, and, surprisingly, funny. I looked forward to every session. After that session ended our group went on to study some other topic or book of the Bible and I didn't think about Beth Moore much after that until her name came up in the news.

In 2016 Beth Moore made a bit of a splash in the news because she was one of the few well-known Christians to criticize publicly then-candidate Trump for his Access Hollywood tape where he talked about the way he treats women. I remember being pleased when I heard this. Finally a Christian standing up to despicable Trump behavior. What we didn't hear about on the news was how awful the people in her church and the Southern Baptist Conference (SBC) treated her after that criticism. Christians were angry with Moore, not Trump. 

Moore was back in news again in 2021 when she announced she was splitting from the SBC over the church's handling of sexual abuse cases among pastors. The abuse had been going on for decades but had only recently come to light. Instead of dealing with it church was covering up these crimes. When she confronted the church's leadership over their white-washing of these serious findings, the men on the council essentially told her to "shut up and stay in your lane." She'd had enough and she quit her association with the denomination, which meant it also ended her association with her own congregation. Once again, I rejoiced that some woman was finally standing up to those bullies, disguised as men of God. What I didn't know at the time was Beth Moore, herself, was a sex abuse survivor.

All My Knotted Up Life is Beth Moore's story, starting in her childhood when, as a young child, she was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. It continues through her young adult years where she heard the call to serve God, and onto her ministry years and beyond.

I loved every minute listening to this remarkably candid, funny, excruciating memoir. Beth read the book herself and her Texas drawl is so charming. In fact, I kept thinking her voice reminded me of someone I know well and then realized I have a friend, also from Texas, who sounds just like Beth. I was charmed. I cried as she shared hard stories for her to tell and couldn't help wondering if some of her friends from her old congregation are ashamed at the way they treated her as she tried to stay faithful to God and his calling in her life.

As a Christian I found much comfort in her words. It is so hard to confess to being a Christian these days when so many Christians behave in such un-Christlike ways... purporting to love Jesus but then being the most angry, racist, sexist, unforgiving people on the planet. Not Beth. She's one of the good ones.

This is her story.

My rating: 5 stars.

Note: This is a reposting of the review I wrote in November for this book combined with another memoir, Stay True. I separated it out here and reposted it so I could add the discussion questions, below, for book club discussion groups.

Book Discussion Questions

1. What did you think of the book and your reading experience with it?

2. Have you had any previous experiences with Beth Moore's writings or Bible Studies. If so, in what capacity and what did you think of that work/study?

3. What surprised you most about Moore's story?

4. Moore used a lot of foreshadowing in her writing about events in her childhood before she revealed she was sexually abused by her father. What were some examples of this foreshadowing and how did it make you feel as a reader?

5. Beth Moore described one episode when her father abused her after driving home from a lesson in another town. Do you think this was the first time for this type of behavior? Why or why not?

6. According to A.I.:

Research indicates that child sexual abuse is a significant issue within religious communities, including families of reported Christians. While abuse is generally more common within a child’s home (regardless of religious affiliation), studies have identified specific risk factors and patterns within Christian and other religious settings, particularly involving patriarchal authority structures, the high trust placed in leaders, and a tendency toward secrecy or shielding offenders. 

Do you agree with this statement? How did this same pattern follow Beth Moore throughout her life and her ministry?

7. There were super serious parts to this story but also some very funny moments. Give some examples of the humor used in the book.

8. Moore was a devoted church-goer even as a child and dedicated her life to God even at a young age. Then as an emerging adult she had a mystical experience while a counselor at a girls' camp where she felt the presence of God come over her. (p.112-3) What did she do next? (p.115) Do you recall your baptism and a conversion experience? Talk about them. Have you ever experienced God's presence in this way?

9. Mental illness is a recurring theme throughout the book. Talk about Moore's mother and her husband and their struggles with their mental health issues. 

10. Respond to this quote from the book: "Some of us have prayed hard. And wondered why on earth everything always had to be hard."

11. Beth Moore felt called to Christian ministry yet she kept trying to manufacture how she would serve God. How did she get involved in women's ministry and where did it lead?

12. Beth got herself crosswise with the Southern Baptist Conference several times in her life, the last being in 2021, when she left the conference and her church. How did you feel about these experiences? The reactions from her friends? Her church? Her family, especially her husband.

13. There were a lot more topics we could talk about from the book. Were there any we missed you'd like us to address in our discussion? Expand.

14. Can you imagine asking a friend or family member to read this book? Elaborate.

*I wrote these discussion questions for my own book church made up of a bunch of women who attend the same church as me. I couldn't find any questions online which I though really delved into the depth of the book as much as I hoped they would. Feel free to use these questions for your discussion groups. If you paste any of them onto your post or in printed form, please give me credit. Thank you. Anne@HeadFullofBooks

Sunday Salon -- Hello 2026

Christmas is over but not our memories of it. Here is my daughter's nutcracker collection creatively displayed in her entryway. 

The past few Sundays I have posted lists of books to conclude my reading year in 2025, so today I am posting my first update of 2026. There is a lot to report, making up for a month of no posts:

Weather: Gorgeous! After our November and December of rain, rain, and more rain, we are being rewarded with lovely blue skies, with the temperature in the 40s and 50s during the day and 30s at night. Don actually is on the roof taking down our Christmas lights as I type this paragraph. He thought he'd leave up a few lights as an homage to the Seattle Seahawks since the bulbs are green and blue, their team colors, but he decided to take them all down saying, "When am I going to have another day like today to be outside?"

We are finished with Mom's house: Last week Don and I went to Eugene to meet with my brother and older sister to finish moving everything out of Mom's house, preparing it for sale. We'd gotten the lion's share of the task completed when we were all there in October and on the subsequent trips in November but we still had to deal with all the furniture she didn't take with her to her new place and pack up the loose ends to distribute to St. Vincent's for resale. We did it! The house is empty and new buyers are already in place which means we didn't have to spend a lot of time cleaning. Woot-woot! At one point Mom mused she had no idea how much work it would be to move and clean out a house. We all chuckled. She done all the emotional work while we did all the physical work, I guess.

Christmas decorations and misspellings: For family dinner on Christmas Eve I lovingly set the table ahead of time, using a tablecloth I rarely use, but one dedicated to the holiday. We had a lovely, candlelit dinner after we attended the late afternoon church service. I left the tablecloth in place after cleaning up the dinner, thinking it made the dining room look so festive. The next day, one of my daughters and I sat at the table to play cards. She looked hard at the tablecloth and asked, "How do you spell 'miseltoe'?" I looked where she was looking and realized the whole cloth was covered with a misspelling of the word, spelling it 'misteltoe'. Now I don't know how to feel about the tablecloth. Do I ditch the cloth or do I keep it and make fun of it forevermore? What would you do?

 And then there is this funny ornament: We think it is misspelling/misquoting of Luke 2:11. We put it on the tree every year anyway and then make fun of it. We've had it for years.

This says: "Today ie born wish us a Saviour when ir Christ the Lord." We think it is supposed to say from Luke 2:11: For unto you is born this day in the city of David a saviour, who is Christ the Lord.

Speaking of Christmas decorations: We finally put away all our Christmas decorations yesterday. We like to leave the decorations up through Twelfth Night, January 5th, because that is when the wise men arrived with their gifts. Before we had a chance to put things away we left for Eugene for part of a week and then Don was smashed with meetings when we got back. Anyway the task is done. We even got the stepstool out today to swap out our Christmas glasses and mugs for the regular ones. That is usually the last task we accomplish and it is often weeks after everything else is tucked away.  It is so much fun to put out decorations and so unfun to put them away. I'm sure this is a universal feeling.

End of the year lists: At the end of each year I wrap up my reading-year by putting together a bunch of best-of lists. Click on the links for any of these lists you haven't seen yet or are curious about:

• Top Book Club Selections of 2025
• 2025 Survey of Books -- What books I liked and didn't like in categories
• How I did on my 2025 Reading Challenges -- a final roundup
• A retrospective of 2025 through Sunday Salon posts -- highlights from my year
• Top Ten Books I read in 2025 -- both fiction and nonfiction
• My year in books -- a meme -- silly but fun.

Other blog posts you may have missed:

• Review: The Rose Field --#3 book in the Book of Dust series
• Review: A Marriage at Sea
• First review of 2026: Worth Waiting For
• Classics Club: 26 for 2026 --answering 26 questions about my experiences with classic books.
• Review: The Wind Knows My Name -- a book club selection
• TTT: Anticipated books in 2026
• A Roundup of 50 Books Everyone Should Read Before They Die
• Review: Sunrise on the Reaping -- #5 of Hunger Games series
• Review: Wreck -- sequel to Sandwich

An aside: I just stepped outside and heard an unmistakable sound of a lawn mower. Someone is mowing their lawn in January!

Look at what my daughter made for me: Isn't it wonderful? A warm, colorful, very uniquely patterned comforter. I love it.

Reading in 2026: 

• Of the five books I've finished so far this year, four of them are five-star books: Wreck; The Wind Knows My Name; Mother Mary Comes to Me; and So Far Gone. (Two reviews pending.) It feels like a great start to my reading year. 
• I'm currently reading: A Passage to India (for my 12-pages/day classics challenge; The Correspondent (for book club) and The Lion Women of Tehran (also for book club.) All of these books are also excellent.
• My current reading challenges.

MLK Day: Monday is a National Holiday to honor the legend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Our racist President doesn't think it should be a holiday anymore which infuriates me. If something isn't about him, he hates it. Ugh. In honor of MLK, we will attend a program in our town.  I urge you to do something to honor his memory on Monday also. Find out what is happening in your community. If you don't live in the US, you are lucky, but I fear Trump may cause problems for you, too. I cringe to think of it (Venezuela, Denmark, Greenland, UK, Nigeria...)

Minnesota: While I'm at it, I am also so disturbed about what is happening in Minnesota around the death of Renee Good at the hands of ICE. Say her name. She was not a terrorist. She was a mother and an award-winning poet. What is happening to us? It is so, so ugly. 

I needed a palette cleaner after thinking about all the negative stuff happening in our country. So I visited this site Positive.News  about praise-worthy stuff happening this week in the world. Whew. I feel a bit better.

Happy 2026!

-Anne

Review: WRECK

Today I was reviewing in my mind the five books I've read since the new year has begun and for crying-out-loud I could only remember four of them. I had to consult Goodreads to refresh my memory of this book, Wreck by Catherine Newman. And the funny thing about that is I absolutely loved the book.

Wreck is the sequel to Sandwich, which one of my book groups read last year and everyone loved. If possible I think Wreck is funnier and more poignant than the first and I thought it was plenty funny and poignant.

In Sandwich we meet Rocky who is thrilled to be vacationing with her grown children and her parents, as they vacation on their annual trip to Cape Cod. She is squeezed, literally since the house was small, between the two other generations (in a sandwich) and their needs and she is moody due to her menopause symptoms. While there she starts to feel the weight of some secrets from the past and confronts her feelings about potential future changes. Wreck picks up the story two years later. Rocky and her family are together again, this time their own home in Western Massachusetts. This time the title, Wreck, related to Rocky's health being knocked off kilter and about the news of a train wreck which killed one of her son's friends from high school. Both become obsessions for Rocky's focus.

At many points in the story Ricky finds herself down the rabbit-hole of the Internet finding out information she doesn't want to know about the possible cause of her damnable rash that keeps getting worse. I've done the same thing and usually the results are that good. 

Remember the world from back when you couldn't even find out if you had strep throat without a doctor calling the wall phone in your kitchen? Now you just click into your computer and discover that you have cancer - or that you have - I'm seeing this now - a white-blood-cell disorder called leukopenia - or that they've scheduled your autopsy.

When her daughter is home from work with a migraine, Rocky has to stop herself from googling

how often a migraine turns out to be an occult or bursting brain aneurysm because this is a bad neighborhood in [her] mind that nobody else should be led into. 

There are so many brilliant moments in the book, all of them find me nodding my head. Been there, done that. After her father, who lives with Rocky and her husband after her mother died, can't recall a friend's name, Rocky finds she can relate.

I know this exact feeling. I can be on my mental hands and knees, flailing around under the couch of my mind with a hockey stick, trying to sweep out a name I can't remember — and all I'll dredge up is a Ping-Pong ball, a catnip mouse, and a spool of thread. If I look away, though, sometimes it might creep out on its own little feet.

Or who can't relate to this? When Rocky is ambushed by her grief over the death of her mother, she realizes it has become like a background noise in her life. 

Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove—a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time, though you never get to turn it off.

One reviewer said she thought the book was basically plotless and I would agree, but I would add it was plotless in a good way. Rocky and her family are all living their lives, warts and all. Sometimes things don't go as planned, there are road bumps, and misunderstandings but in the end there is love, And it is love which makes the difference.

I confess to crying during a good deal of this book. I was very touched by it, clearly.  Afterwards I instantly messaged one of my fellow book club members to urge her to read it, if she hasn't already. Now I urge you to do the same, but start with Sandwich. The book could stand on its own but why not get the fuller picture? Besides the books are both easy and enjoyable reads.

My rating: 5 stars.

2026 is off to a good start!

-Anne

Review: SUNRISE ON THE REAPING (+Friday56 LinkUp)

Title: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games #0.5)

Book Beginning quote:

     "Happy Birthday, Haymitch!"

     The upside of being born on reaping day is that you get to sleep late on your birthday. It is pretty much downhill from there.

Friday56 quote:

     So don't feed the nightmares. Don't let yourself panic. Don't give the Capitol that. They've taken enough already.

Summary: It is the Quarter Quells which means there will twice as many tributes competing in the Hunger Games this year. Twenty-four in all. So when Haymitch Abernathy is selected to represent one of the four from District 12, he isn't really surprised. This is his story.

Review: Back in 2008 I became a Hunger Games fan. I was a fledgling teen librarian at the time and I was thrilled to find a book kids were really excited about. To a small degree the series became like that generation's Harry Potter. I wasn't blogging at the time but by the time Catching Fire came out a year later I was, so I did a combination review of books. Read it here. Over the next several years I re-reviewed both of the books once more (Hunger Games here; Catching Fire here) and had many more mentions of the books in my blog when I created several different lists of favorite/most popular books in the library. In 2010 when we were preparing to receive the third book in the series, Mockingjay, I was thrilled and created an announcement post. (Read it here.) I ordered three books to arrive the day it came out in August 2010 so my daughters and I could all read it at the same time. Here we are doing just that:

Me and my college-age daughters reading Mockingjay the day it arrived in August 2010.

And here is my review of Mockingjay written just five days after the launch of the book.

Fast forward ten years to 2020 when Suzanne Collins published the fourth book in the series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I was retired by then so I have no idea what kind of reception the book got in the library. Were teens familiar with the series anymore? I didn't know. My younger daughter, who was home with us for COVID lockdown, and I planned to read this one at the same time but my older daughter hijacked my copy of the book before I could get to it. Not together, but the three of us all read it eventually. I didn't like this prequel, considered #0.0 in the series, as much as the originals. (Read my review here.) For one thing I thought the book was too long and could easily have been published as two books. And I realized I didn't feel the need to know how President Snow got started with the Hunger Games. I am realizing just now as I type this, perhaps I didn't like this book as well because I didn't like the COVID lockdowns and had a lot of trouble settling down with books in general that whole year. Not the book's fault, but COVID's? Hmm.

Proof that the series was popular with teens in my library. Hunger Games and the two sequels (at the time) were all in the top ten for circulations in my library over the eleven years the school was open. I created this list on the last day of school in 2016.

Knowing I was so ambivalent about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I hesitated getting very excited about the fifth book in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping. You'd never know this, however, since I went ahead and preordered the audiobook to arrive the day it was published in March. In fact, I let both of my girls listen to it on my Audible account first. Then I kept putting off listening, finally resolving to listen to the book before year's end. I finished it in the nick of time, on December 26th. And here I am reviewing it almost a month later. Dragging my feet again. My last review from books read in 2025.

To say that I was delighted with Sunrise on the Reaping is an understatement. I felt like I was back in 2008-09, reading Hunger Games and Catching Fire for the first time. I was just as enthralled with the story and horrified by the whole premise of the games. Exciting parts were exciting and the backstory was the best of the whole set. But here is my favorite part, which was very different than the other four, Sunrise on the Reaping was stuffed full of poetry. The book almost sang for it. In my opinion it made the emotions of story more amplified. A good deal of the poetry was from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". I recognized it. But a lot of the poetry went unattributed in the audiobook like the snippet below was from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence". I looked it up. And I imagine a good deal of the poetry was written by Collins herself.

"A truth that's told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent." --William Blake

It was on the point of the poetry that Don, my husband who listened to the audiobook with me, and I diverged on our review of the story. I loved it, he not so much. Or to be more precise, he didn't care for the way that the book's narrator, Jefferson White, read the verses of "The Raven." He read with a definite beat, almost like a drum beating out the rhythm. I interpreted this as the beating of Haymitch's heart or the drumbeat going on inside his head. A picky detail but it lost a rating point for Don. I gave the book a 5-star rating, he gave it 4-stars.

As you can see from this disjointed and long-winded review, I have had a lot to do with The Hunger Games over the past seventeen years and have loved most of those moments, especially those shared with my family. Do I need another sequel/prequel? No, I'm satisfied with where the story let us off at the end of Sunrise on the Reaping. Will I read another sequel/prequel if another comes along. Yes. Yes, I will. I'm a fan, remember?

 

Now it is your turn to share what you think of the Hunger Games series or tell us about the book you are currently reading... comment and link up below.

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RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

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*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

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-Anne