Book Reviews

Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
by Tracy Kidder, 2023 Tracy Kidder, a literary journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New

Say Nothing—A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
by Patrick Radden Keefe, 2019 Spurred on by reading the 2013 obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times,

Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022 Demon Copperhead tells the raw, emotional tale of a 10-year-old boy’s heartbreaking childhood and adolescence scarred

Winter Work
by Dan Fesperman, 2022 Winter Work is a mesmerizing mix of fact and fiction, and as a reader you have

Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Danial Silva, 2022 I had the good fortune to hear Daniel Silva speak in Houston earlier this summer while

Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders
by Kathryn Miles, 2022 Just released on May 3, 2022, I’ve blasted through Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the

The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story
By Laura Davis, 2021 I’m a member of a Facebook group that focuses on memoir writing, and this author, Laura

HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time
by Brad Aronson, 2020 Brad wrote HumanKind after helping his wife through a leukemia diagnosis and treatment, and being overwhelmed

Never Simple: A Memoir
by Liz Scheier, 2022 There are mother-daughter stories, and then there are jaw-dropping mother-daughter stories, where you read them and

Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner, 2021 Michelle Zauner has written a heartwarming story of love, loss, and food in her memoir Crying

Mercy Street
by Jennifer Haigh, 2022 Mercy Street is a novel about a women’s clinic in Boston, Massachusetts. The real name of

Notes on an Execution
by Danya Kukafka, 2022 Notes on an Execution had such an eerie, true-to-life feeling for me that at one point

Razorblade Tears: A Novel
by S. A. Cosby, 2021 Sometimes I want to just dive into something trashy and escapist, and that’s when I

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Ditlevsen, 2021 The New York Times Book Review editors were wildly enthusiastic about The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth;

A Town Called Solace
by Mary Lawson, 2021 A Town Called Solace was longlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, and is quite different

The Fortune Men: A Novel
by Nadifa Mohamed, 2021 The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, and is a novel based

How Beautiful We Were: A Novel
by Imbolo Mbue, 2020 How Beautiful We Were: A Novel was listed as one of the 10 best books of

The Promise
by Damon Galgut, 2021 The Promise won the Man Booker Prize for Literary Fiction in 2021, and for the first

Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror & The Light
by Hilary Mantel, 2009, 2012, 2019 Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & The Light I list

The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom, 2019 The Yellow House was the 2019 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction. A memoir about
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Welcome to the Rabid Readers Club!
To say I’ve been an avid (rather, a rabid) reader my whole life dates as far back as I can remember—to my jumping-out-of-my-skin with excitement when the Bookmobile would come into my neighborhood. Pippi Longstocking and her wild adventures on the high seas were a huge fascination for me. Such boldness! Such freedom!
Fast-forward to adulthood: I’ve been listening to audiobooks for more than 30 years. I initially started out listening to books on tape, strapping my clunky Sony® Walkman® contraption to my belt as I took long walks for exercise. Listening to books helped take my mind off the heat and humidity while I was exercising, and also was a great escape after the workday. But when Apple Computer® released their first-generation iPod® in 2001, that was it for me—I was an early and permanent convert to books in downloadable format. Audible.com came into being in 1997 and I became a subscriber shortly after purchasing that first iPod. My account says I now have 382 books archived in my library, but that can’t be right—that number sounds way too low, for about 22 years of subscribing!
Anyway, I love to talk about books and share the best ones I’ve read with other rabid readers. I’ll post my favorites here on a regular basis. Anyone who has a comment or who has a book to recommend is welcome to join the conversation!
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