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