Reading Goals -- Completed and Begun

Somehow, it's already January 11 and I haven't written any wrap-up posts for my 2022 reading OR declared what my plans for this year are.  Oops!  Time to rectify that.  

First, let's look at my goals from last year.

Overall Goal

I kept my reading goal at 55 last year.  That's just over one book a week, and I know I generally read at least that many.  In 2022, I read 103 books!  

My Year with Irene Kelly

I decided I wanted to reread the four Irene Kelly mysteries by Jan Burke that I had read previously, and then read the rest of the series too.  And I succeeded!  Well, basically.  I did not read the final book because it revolved around the disturbing serial killer from an earlier book that I had absolutely loathed.  In fact, I disliked that earlier book so much, I didn't even review it on my blog.  I decided I just didn't need to read more about that icky character, so I stopped with book ten.  But I still consider that challenge completed because I chose not to read the last book, I didn't just run out of time or oomph.

You can read my reviews for those books right here.

#TheUnreadShelfProject2022

My goal for last year was to get my unread book collection down under 500 books.  I started out with 512 books, I read 65 books from my TBR shelves... and I ended up with 499 unread books.  So, the good news is, I DID get down under 500 books, but the bad news is that I only barely managed that.  I really need to stay away from used bookstores, heh.

The Disney Origins Book Club

I joined a year-long challenge on Instagram to read books that Disney movies have been based on.  I wanted to participate in at least six months, and I managed seven, so yay!  Those seven were:

• "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen
• The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
• Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton
• Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
• "Beauty and the Beast" and "Cinderella" collected by Andrew Lang
• Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers
• Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Diverse Reading

I set myself the goal of reading at least 12 books by or about people with a different ethnicity, culture, or background from my own.  And I succeeded!  I reviewed most of them here, and you can read those reviews here.

A few fun stats:

103 books read, total 

29 rereads 

2 nonfiction 

12 diverse reads 

8 manga

7 read aloud to my kids 

1 audiobook

Now for my 2023 reading goals!

Overall Goal

I'm keeping this at 55.  It's manageable, and I get a big kick out of surpassing it.

Diverse Reading

Once again, I want to read at least 12 books by or about people who are significantly different from myself somehow.

Classics Club

I want to read at least 12 books from my fourth Classics Club list.

#TheUnreadShelfProject2023

My goal this year is to get my unread book count down to 450.  This is ambitious, but I like challenges.

My Years with the Sacketts

I have spent a few years collecting up all the Louis L'Amour books about the Sackett family, and I have them all now!  There are nineteen books in all, so I don't expect to read them all in 2023 -- instead, my goal is to read ten this year and nine next year.  I plan to read them in chronological order, not in publication order.  Or, at least, in the chronological order I found online -- I guess some people disagree about what order they go in, so I'll just do my best.

Do you set reading goals?  Do you share them?  If so, leave a link and I'll check them out!

"Les Miserables" (Manga Classics) by Victor Hugo (original story), Crystal S. Chan (story adaptation), and SunNeko Lee (artwork)

The Manga Classics team did a remarkable job of paring down Victor Hugo's massive, rambling novel into a manga under 350 pages.  If you're familiar with the musical, you'll probably like a lot of the streamlining they did, as it's pretty similar to the musical.  They glossed over Fantine's final resorts to earn money in a tasteful way, enough so that I'll let my tween daughters read it.

I don't have lots to say about this one.  It presents Jean Valjean's journey from being released from prison to falling back into thievery, to repentance and reformation, to running from Inspector Javert over and over, to adopting orphaned Cosette and seeing her fall in love with a revolution-leaning lawyer named Marius, and so on.

I did feel that some of the artwork, especially Jean Valjean, reminded me of Nokman Poon's art for the Manga Classics Great Expectations and Count of Monte Cristo, and not so much like SunNeko Lee's art for their Jane Eyre... and then, I discovered at the back of the book that Nokman Poon served as the Chief Art Assistant here!  So that was kind of cool.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for depictions of poverty, theft, violence toward a child, men taunting a woman, and revolutionary violence that is pretty bloodless but does include a child's death.

This has been my 65th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022!!!

"Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas" by Stephanie Barron

It's been ten years since I read any of the Jane Austen Mysteries by Stephanie Barron.  And I have only read the first four, which means there are seven books between where I stopped and this one.  But none of that mattered at ALL because I dove merrily and seamlessly into this book and enjoyed it thoroughly.

The only reason I quit reading this series in the first place is that my foolish local library system got rid of them.  Hmph.  I picked up a copy of this at the used book store and saved it to enjoy this month.  And enjoy it, I did!

Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra, and their mother get invited to a Christmas house party at the grand home The Vyne, owned by the wealthy Chute family.  This is especially welcome because they three ladies are spending the Christmas season with Jane's brother James Austen and his family, and his wife Mary is... well, you know Mary (Eliot) Musgrove in Persuasion?  Imagine if she was shrewish as well as petty and whiny, and you have Mary Austen as portrayed in this novel.

Unfortunately, during the festive house party, a messenger arrives with a message of great military and political import (it involves that upstart new country, the United States of America)... and gets murdered.  Jane Austen teams up with a new friend, Raphael West, who turns out to be much more than simply artist Benjamin West's son.  Together, they solve the crime, plus a few more that follow.  The whole book is a galloping good time, and I am now determined to collect up the whole series and finish reading it.

(from my Instagram)

Particularly Good Bits:

The little fever of envy, once caught, is the ruin of all happiness (p. 142)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some mild bad language, unwitnessed violence, talk of suicide, and some decorous reflections on adult activities.

This is my 7th book read and reviewed for the Literary Christmas reading challenge this year, and the 64th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Catching Christmas" by Terri Blackstock

I liked this book so much more than I expected to!  I picked it up at a library book sale at some point because I read a couple of Blackstock's books a few years ago and liked them.  But then I read some reviews that said the book was disappointing or boring or something, and so I went into it with really low expectations.  That might be why I liked it so much, I suppose.

Finn is a cab driver who answers a call to pick up a little old lady at her house.  He takes her to a doctor's appointment and leaves her in the waiting room with his card so she can call him again when she's done.  And he makes some very grumpy assumptions about the kind of people who would leave this sweet old lady to the care of a cab driver to get to a doctor's appointment.

Callie, the old lady, doesn't call him, so Finn goes back hours later because he's worried about her.  He discovers she's fallen asleep and never been seen by the doctor at all.  Now he's really upset with her family, whoever they may be.

Callie's granddaughter Sydney is a first-year lawyer at a high-powered firm that's just laid off most of its junior associates.  She's hanging onto her job by the skin of her teeth, trying to salvage a horrible case defending a frat boy who is clearly guilty as charged.  She's spending ten or twelve hours a day at work on this case, and using the rest of her time to care for her grandmother the best she can.  Her parents have both passed away, she's Callie's only remaining relative, and she's doing the best she can to juggle work and caring for her grandmother.

Naturally, Finn and Sydney eventually meet up.  Naturally, Callie tries to play matchmaker for them.  It was never a hard-to-predict plot, but it was very sweet and lovely.  But not sugary!  Finn has a biting wit and no-nonsense attitude that keeps the story from feeling saccharine.  

I suppose if you expected this book to be a suspenseful thriller like the other series I read by Blackstock, you would find this cozy and heartwarming story disappointing.  But I liked it a LOT.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for themes about elder abuse, dying, and the court case that involved alcohol and drug abuse.

This is my sixth book read for the Literary Christmas reading challenge and my 62nd for #TheUnreadShelfChallenge2022.

"Silent Night; Holy Night" by Colleen Coble

Because I enjoyed All is Calm; All is Bright so much last month, I thought I would try Colleen Coble's other Christmas novella duology too.  And now I have a conundrum: do I keep this paperback because I really liked one of the stories, or do I put it in the Little Free Library I steward because I didn't like the other story?  Ahhh, the troubles a bookworm faces, eh?

Silent Night is part of the Rock Harbor series set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  I lived in Michigan's Thumb for nine years as a kid and visited the UP several times, so I really loved the setting for this story.  I also enjoyed that it wasn't about two people falling in love, but about a husband-and-wife team of search-and-rescue people who live in a lighthouse.  It's all about a skydiver who dies and turns out to have had ties to a recent kidnapping.  I very much liked this story and would like to read the series at some point.

Holy Night is part of the Aloha Reef series set in Hawaii.  The setting was really fascinating, since I've never been to Hawaii, but I didn't like the characters very well, and you know that is make-or-break for me.  The main character, Kaia, kept refusing to trust her fiance with Extremely Important Information.  Over and over.  And did her fiance decide maybe this was a reason to reevaluate whether or not they should get married?  No, he was all focused on feeling abandoned and emotionally discarded.  Plus, he seemed to mostly love Kaia because she was hawt -- he kept focusing on their upcoming wedding night rather on the way she was not being a particularly sensible or trustworthy person. I would not have finished reading this novella except that I really loved Kaia's sister Eva, a young woman with Down Syndrome who gets kidnapped.  I very much needed to know if she got through this okay, so I kept reading.

So, now I just have to decide if I should keep this because I probably would like to reread Silent Night at some point, or if I should not.  Sigh.  Maybe I will keep it until I get a chance to read more of the Rock Harbor series, and then decide.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for kidnappings, characters in danger, and a some intense kissing and mildly suggestive content.  No on-page smut.

This is my fifth book read for the Literary Christmas reading challenge and my 61st for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"The Mistletoe Murder" by P. D. James

This is a collection of four short Christmas mysteries by P. D. James.  I'm afraid I didn't actually love any of them, though I did enjoy three of the four.  Here's a bit of what each is about, and what I thought of them:

"The Mistletoe Murder" -- A crime novelist reminisces about the time she was invited to a traditional English country house Christmas, someone got murdered, and she eventually figured out how and why.  I liked the 1940s setting and atmosphere, but was overall meh about the way this one basically excused murder as being okay if you have "good" reasons.

"A Very Commonplace Murder" -- A peeping tom knows that the wrong person is being tried for murder, but doesn't come forward.  This one was fairly icky and voyeuristic, and I was not a fan.  Also, I figured out whodunit before the reveal, which annoyed me.

"The Boxdale Inheritance" -- Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh investigates a long-ago death at the behest of a family who wants to know if they can accept an inheritance in good conscience.  This one surprised me several times, and I quite enjoyed it.  My favorite of the four.

"The Twelve Clues of Christmas" -- Sergeant Adam Dalgliesh investigates what appears to be a suicide, but which he is convinced is a murder.  It got a little too cute here and there, and I kept feeling super sorry for Dalgliesh because he was missing out on enjoying Christmas with his family to deal with the crime.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 overall, but R for "A Very Commonplace Murder," which has all sorts of stuff about porn and voyeurism and rape.  The rest have little light cussing, four murders, some adult dialog.

This is my fourth book read for the Literary Christmas reading challenge and my 60th for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"The Snow Storm: A Christmas Story" by Catherine Gore

Although parts of this had that overblown purple prose too many Victorian authors were fond of, the story was a lovely one, and I especially enjoyed the last few chapters.

The story concerns a small British village next to a large estate.  The estate was purchased by some newly rich people and utterly renovated by them quite recently.  They plan to have a fancy Christmas party there and have invited a lot of friends from London to make merry there with them.

The renovations involved turning an old man out of the farm which his family had tenanted for generations, and he is slowly sinking toward death with the grief of this.  But he has a very cheerful and competent niece (?) who is taking care of him now and has made his poor cottage into a snug home.

The London friends get stuck in a blizzard on their way to the estate and must take shelter where they can.  Naturally, some of them stop at this cottage of the poor, dispossessed old man.  Also naturally, a stranger also stops there who turns out not to be a stranger at all, because this is Victorian Literature and Everyone Must Be Connected Somehow.

Happily, I read enough Victorian books to be cool with that ;-)  I did enjoy the book a lot, though I freely admit to having skimmed some of the more purple parts.

Particularly Good Bits:

The poor were sanguine.  The poor are usually sanguine.  It is one of the few luxuries in which they can indulte.

...she had laughed her way through the labours of life;--guiltless of an unkind word or unfair action:--comprising her moral law in "do as you would be done by;" and her philosophy in "put your shoulder to the wheel; tomorrow's a handier help than yesterday."

If Dinah's whole life, in short, had been one of unmixed prosperity, it could scarcely have left her more thankful, or more thoroughly content.

However cheerless the prospects of the family, the sunshine of her buoyant spirits rendered them light.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Nothing objectionable here.

This is my third book read for the Literary Christmas Reading Challenge, my 59th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022, and my sixth for my fourth Classics Club list.

"Emmazel" by Kendra E. Ardnek

I really enjoyed the first two books in this series, Rose Petals and Snowflakes and Crown and Cinder, but I LOVED Emmazel.  That surprised me, because Emma is one of my least-favorite Jane Austen books, and even though Rapunzel is one of my more-favorite fairy tales, I thought the Emma connection would possibly hold me away from this a bit.  But, instead, Ardnek adressed the things that bug me about Emma (Emma's incorrigible meddling, in particular) and tweaked them in ways that made the characters work much better for me.

Emmazel is known locally as "the witch of the tower."  She has lived for decades in a magical tower that keeps her safe.  There, she tends her garden, makes love "potions" and herbal remedies, and delights in finding noble husbands for her assistants.  But she has more power than she realizes and is more important than she knows, and when a man called Sir E arrives and gradually reveals who and what Emmazel really is, everything changes.  For the better, eventually, but things are untidy and difficult for quite some time.  Throw in a flirty prince, a sarcastic cat, and a father who can turn himself into the wind, and you've got a very magical story here indeed.

My favorite aspect of this book is that Mr. Knightley here is a talking cat named Night.  Somehow, that is just absolutely perfect, and... I don't want to spoil this book too much, but pretty much all my favorite parts involved Night.  And, yes, there's still some romance, even though Night is a cat and Emmazel is not.  Trust me, it works, and it's not weird.  You'll just have to read it.

I also loved that Emmazel is in her forties.  No teenage princess here, which was really interesting and refreshing!

Particularly Good Bits:

"Everything will be all right.  It's okay to be scared when your world grows.  And yours has been so small for so long" (p. 73).

"One should never swear off men until at least six weeks have passed since your disappointment" (p. 86).

"I've always thought that orphans found on doorsteps have the best opinions of all," said Christian.  "For if they are well-treated and happy with their lot, then things really are at peace, yes?" (p. 159).

"There's more to life than exotic fish" (p. 165).

"Live in a tower with a snarky, talking cat for over twenty years, and soon you run out of polite conversation and move on to friendly jabs" (p. 174).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some discussions of love potions, children who were abandoned, and discussions of parents dying.

This has been my 58th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"All is Calm; All is Bright" by Colleen Coble

This book is two Christian fiction mystery novellas, All is Calm and All is Bright, and although they both belong to other series Coble has written, they stand on their own perfectly well too.  Which is good, because we read this for my church's book club this month, and none of us had read any of her other books before.  But I plan to look for more now!

All is Calm is part of the Lonestar series, which takes place in Texas (obviously).  A woman accused of helping sabotage a race horse runs away -- with the race horse -- and finds sanctuary at a ranch that helps kids with emotional problems.  She had stayed there as a teen and remembers that it was a place of comfort and hope.  Once there, she teams up with an injured veteran to figure out who actually sabotaged the horse... and they end up clearing up a couple other mysteries too.  And falling in love in the process, because of course they do!

All is Bright is part of the Hope Beach series, which is set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  In it, a bright and helpful woman is targeted by an unknown assailant who forces her car off the road and into the ocean.  She survives, but she and the local sheriff can't figure out who would try to harm or kill her, since she's the most helpful person you've ever met.  Of course, they eventually do solve the mystery and catch the culprit, while starting to fall a little bit in love in the process.  

Of the two, I liked All is Calm better.  Part of that was the location -- a Texas ranch is always going to be catnip for me -- but part of it was that I simply felt like we got to know the characters in it really well.  I had a little bit harder time connecting to the people in All is Bright, but I did enjoy it a lot anyway.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10 for some mild violence and characters in peril.  Both romances are clean and wholesome.

This is my second book read and reviewed for A Literary Christmas and my 57th read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"The Christmas Hirelings" by M. E. Braddon

This sweet little novella is like the epitome of Victorian Christmas fiction: filled with the knowledge that life can be fleeting and people can be cruel... but they don't need to be.

An aging aristocrat, his good friend, and his niece are all set to spend a very boring Christmas together at the aristocrat's country manor.  Then his friend suggests they "hire" some children to liven up their festivities, and after some consideration, they decide to do exactly this.  The friend departs for a while and returns with three siblings who are genteel, enthusiastic, and intelligent, and who fill the manor house with all the joy and brightness it was missing.

The smallest child is precocious in both intellect and attitude, and she captures the aristocrat's attention and eventually claims his heart (in a grandfatherly sort of way, never fear)... and then calamity strikes.  And, because this is Victorian literature, you can never be too sure that everything will turn out fine because some Victorian authors will just randomly kill off children just to make you cry, so I finished the last couple chapters of this novella with a lot of trepidation.  But I liked it a lot, by the very end.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Christmas can hardly be made too much of where there are children in question."

"They are small, but they are people."

Each of the children discovered a glittering new coin, and in Moppet's portion there were two sixpences.  The stout and serious butler helping the pudding on the carving-table by the light of a single candle was suspected of treasonable practices.

"People who are unhappy don't like anything.  Unhappiness is disliking."

"My life was barren, but it was peaceful.  What more did I want?"

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Clean and innocent and sweet.

I read this as part of the #DickensDecember2022 group challenge on Instagram, and it's also my first book read for the Literary Christmas Reading Challenge this year.  It's also my sixth book read for my fourth Classics Club list AND my 56th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.  Whew!

"Kidnapped" by Jan Burke

This was a nail-biter, and no mistake.  So many little threads of killings and kidnappings and disappearances and deaths, all woven together skillfully.

A young man goes to prison for killing his father and little sister.  His brother and mother are convinced he's innocent.  Fast-forward a few years, and new evidence crops up, old evidence is shown to be mismanaged and misidentified, and then a dead body linked to another kidnapping is found, and suddenly lots of crimes that seemed unrelated start forming a pattern.  At least, that's how intrepid reporter Irene Kelly sees it, and her police detective husband Frank sees it the same way.  

This book marks the end of My Year with Irene Kelly.  Although there is one more book in the series, Disturbance, I won't be reading it.  I discovered that it deals with the same ultra-creepy killer from Bones, which I disliked so much when I read it earlier this year that I didn't even review it.  I don't want to remember it.  So I know I don't want to read another book about the same guy.

I'm really happy I've finally read this whole series!  Bloodlines remains my personal favorite, and I also think it's the most masterful of the ten I've read.  But I very much enjoyed most of the other books, including this one.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: R for semi-graphically described murders, bad language, adult dialog, and some non-graphic sexual situations.

This has been the 55th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Gilead" by Marilynn Robinson

Hmm.  Hmm hmm hmm.  This was an unusual book, and no mistake.

The whole thing is a letter from an aging pastor with a deadly heart problem -- he's writing to his young son because he knows his son will have to grow up without getting to know him, and he wants to leave him with some understanding of who his father was.  So, there are no chapter breaks, just places where he stops writing for a while and then comes back.

It's a series of musings about this man's life, his views on the world, his family history, and his thoughts on religion.  There's also a lot about how he met his much-younger wife, the joy she and their son have brought to his waning years, and what it's like to be the pastor of a very small congregation in rural Iowa in the first half of the twentieth century.  

Me, I was born in rural Iowa when my father was the pastor of a very small congregation.  So I probably related to that aspect more than some readers would.  We moved away when I was three, but my family's roots are all in rural Iowa, and my parents have retired there.  It's a good, rich place to live, with its own quiet beauty and strength.  Some of that shone through in this book, and I was glad of that.

Yeah, anyway, about the book.  It rambles, it circles back to things discussed earlier, it goes off on tangents -- I eventually just had to sternly tell myself that I would finish this book before I could start reading anything else.  As it is, it took me five months to finish it.

Now, it wasn't boring.  It was really quite fascinating.  Except that, I somehow never remembered how interesting it was when I wasn't actively reading it.  I would set it down and just go my merry way, and only physically seeing it would remind me to read it.  That's very weird for me, as usually I think about the things I'm reading while I'm not actually reading them.  I can only remember one other instance when I was this disconnected from a book I was enjoying, and that was Papillon by Henri Charriere.  Same thing there when I read that one ten or twelve years ago -- I'd be engrossed while reading, then totally detach as soon as I put it down.  So weird.

The most interesting part was when the narrator was talking about the Spanish Influenza during World War One.  He says, "People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all.  They'd sit as far from each other as they could" (p. 47).  Boy, does that sound familiar!  And, lest you think Robinson wrote that with Covid-19 in mind, this book was published in 2004, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Anyway, I disagreed with a lot of the main character's theology, and I was really sad that he never leaned on God for comfort or help.  There's a middle-aged man whose story weaves in and out of this one who desperately needed to know that God loves and forgives him, but the pastor never shared that with this other man at all, and toward the end, that made me pretty disgusted.  It IS a pretty clear picture of what happens when you remove Christ from Christianity, I'll give it that.

The title interests me greatly because, these days, the Bible reference to Gilead that springs to mind most often is from Jeremiah 8, when he laments, "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?" (Jer. 8: 22 KJV)  I can see how that relates to the book, because both the pastor narrator and the middle-aged man he keeps trying to help both are searching for the balm of God's love and forgiveness and utterly missing out on it.

Still, it was a beautifully written, contemplative book, as you'll see in the parts I quote below.  But I left it feeling like it could have been so much more.  The narrator clings to the forms and idea of faith, but not to the Savior we place our faith in. In the end, it felt empty of hope and joy, and that was disappointing.  

Particularly Good Bits:

It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled.  That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so (p. 27).

I am also inclined to overuse the word 'old,' which actually has less to do with age, as it seems to me, than it does with familiarity.  it sets a thing apart as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection.  Sometimes it suggests a haplessness or vulnerability.  I say 'old Boughton,' I say 'this shabby old town,' and I mean that they are very near my heart (p. 32-33)  (My Iowa-born pastor father uses 'old' the exact same way.)

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear (p. 56).

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company (p. 227).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for discussions of violence and bloodshed during the Civil War, racism, miscegenation laws, and some non-smutty discussions of unwed motherhood.  No bad language or racy scenes.

This has been my 54th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie

My favorite part of this book was figuring out that Hercule Poirot was in it before he was actually mentioned by name.

My least-favorite part of this book was figuring out who the killer was about two-thirds of the way through the book, and being right.  I really hate that.  I pretty much demand that the detective and the villain in a mystery book or show or movie should be smarter than I am.  If I figure things out before the big reveal, I feel cheated.  I don't try to figure them out -- I even actively try NOT to.  But sometimes, it happens, and then I'm kinda bummed.  Especially since several people told me to avoid spoilage on this, and that I was going to really enjoy the reveal.  Oh well, it was still a fun Hercule Poirot mystery :-)

This one is kind of a locked-room mystery and kind of a house-party mystery, and also a cozy-village mystery.  A rich guy gets murdered, lots of people who were at his big estate for a party are suspects, and so are lots of people in the village.  There are some obvious suspects and some not-so-obvious ones, and Poirot's little grey cells get quite a workout before the end.

Particularly Good Bits:

It is odd, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial (p. 225).

"It is completely unimportant," said Poirot.  "That is why it is so interesting," he added softly (p. 288).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for murder, some innuendo and talk about unwed mothers, and a smattering of mild bad language.

This has been my fifth book read from my fourth Classics Club list, and also my 53rd book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"The Vanderbeekers Make a Wish" by Karina Yan Glaser

This series continues to be a complete delight!  I probably start all my reviews for these books this way, but it's true.  I love this fictional family.

In The Vanderbeekers Make a Wish, the kids are trying to find a way to make their father's upcoming 40th birthday extra special.  They hit on the idea of recreating a road trip he was supposed to take with his own father after graduating from college, but which never happened because their grandfather died.

The only trouble is, their other grandparents have come for an unannounced, unexpected visit.  And, while the Vanderbeeker kids know they should love their grandparents, they struggle a lot with that.  Their mom's father is quiet and observant and almost never talks.  Their mom's mother is bossy, demanding, and unsatisfied with everything and everyone.  Still, the kids obey their parents' reminders to be polite and kind and respectful to their grandparents... most of the time.  They're kids, and they stumble, but they also apologize and ask for forgiveness when they do.

I loved how this particular book wove more of their mother's Chinese heritage into the story.  But mostly, I loved the utterly believable generational conflicts and conundrums.  This family feels very real, but in a light and uplifting way.  The parents are good parents, the kids are good kids, and the misunderstandings and scrapes that occur are never overblown OR underplayed.

Particularly Good Bits:

Upstairs, Mama was finishing up a batch of granola that Oliver and Papa would take with them, the musical clinking of metal bowls and wooden spoons a comforting sound that the Vanderbeeker kids had all been hearing since birth (p. 2-3).

Even though Hyacinth herself was quiet, she preferred to be around people who talked a lot.  That meant she could listen, which made her happy (p. 176).

We don't know a lot about the adults in our lives," Hyacinth said.  "They're all mysteries" (p. 223).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Wholesome and uplifting and wonderful.

This has been the 52nd book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Cranford" by Elizabeth Gaskell

What a lovely, gentle book!  I've seen both seasons of the 2007-10 BBC series based on this, so I felt like I knew the characters already a bit, and that only added to my delight.  I chuckled aloud many times over the foibles of the people in this book, and then the last two chapters brought tears to my eyes.  Happy tears, as I tend to cry over joyful things more than sad ones.

A young woman named Mary Smith visits the small English town of Cranford repeatedly over the course of several years.  Through her, we get to know the people of the town reasonably well.  Most of them are women, and most of the women are aging and a bit poor.  Some become quite poor over the course of the story.  But they all behave, dress, and talk in the most genteel way they can manage -- sometimes that becomes ridiculous and laughable, and sometimes that becomes endearing.

The whole point, obviously, is to poke a little fun at societal conventions and those who adhere strictly to them, as well as to make plain the very narrow world women were forced to inhabit in the mid-1800s.  It's at once a bit satirical, a bit ironic, and very sympathetic.

Particularly Good Bits:

Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other's proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other's opinions (p. 5).

"Ah!" he said, "we farmers ought not to have much time for reading; yet somehow one can't help it" (p. 42).

"I only hope it is not improper; so many pleasant things are!" (p. 43)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G for being good, wholesome, lovely, and genuinely charming.

This has been my fourth book read for my fourth Classics Club list, and also my 51st book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Among the Shadows" by L. M. Montgomery

This was just the right thing to read the week before Halloween, for me.  A few slightly spooky stories, some eerie ones, and the rest just with a tinge of darkness around the edges.  I do NOT enjoy horror stories, in print or on the screen, but I trusted Montgomery not to scare me, just give me a little thrill here and there.  And she definitely delivered!

This is a collection of her short stories, and I think I had read at least one of them before, possibly in an e-book collection of a dozen or so of her stories that I read a while ago.  Anyway, the stories I enjoyed most were:

+ "Detected by the Camera" -- an amateur photographer inadvertently solves a crime.

+ "From Out the Silence" -- a woman misses her best friend, who died suddenly after they had a silly quarrel, but learns her friend forgave her after all.

+ "The House Party on Smoky Island" -- a supernatural visitor saves a marriage.

+ "Miss Calista's Peppermint Bottle" -- forgiveness and peppermint extract solve a crime and save a soul.

+ "A Redeeming Sacrifice" -- eavesdropping convinces a bad boy to leave a good girl alone.

+ "The Redemption of John Churchill" -- eavesdropping convinces a pardoned felon that his life can have meaning again.  Absolutely my favorite story here.

(From my Instagram account.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for discussions of killing, death, theft, ghosts, hauntings, and unwed mothers. Not really a book for kids, although there's nothing actually bad here.

This has been my third book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list, and also my 50th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022 !!!!

"Prince of Thieves" by Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas wrote books about Robin Hood?  Say what now? 

Yes, it is true!  In fact, he wrote more than one.  Prince of Thieves is the first, and it's an origin story for Robin Hood.  It's rather different from the usual Robin Hood origin stories you get from authors like Howard Pyle.  Robin Hood here is the son of a nobleman, yes, but he's taken as an infant and given to a forester to raise because his father is dead and there's someone out to get his inheritance, and so on.  Robin grows up happily in the forest (I mean, who wouldn't?) and is in his mid-teens when he starts to have adventures, meets Maid Marian and Little John and Friar Tuck, and so on.

Most of the plot revolves around some friends of his who are trying to get married, but the girl's dad forbids the match and tries to have her intended killed, and there's all manner of skulduggery and mayhem, along with some hijinks.  It's a totally different story from any Robin Hood I've read before, and I had a lot of fun imagining Dumas just chuckling with glee as he came up with it.  It definitely stars the cheerful kind of Robin Hood that I like best.  But it's almost more of an ensemble piece, really.  I assume the sequel, Robin Hood the Outlaw, probably deals more with getting Robin's rightful inheritance back?  We shall see!  It's sitting on my TBR shelves.

Prince of Thieves was first published after Dumas's death.  It has nothing whatever to do with the Kevin Costner movie with the same title, sorry.  The version I read was translated into English by Alfred Allinson, and it has deliberately archaic language, which I'm assuming Dumas also affected, full of prithee and mayest thou and so on.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG.  It has some violence and even killing, but it's totally not gory or scary or even intense.  Still, people do die, sometimes in somewhat distressing ways if you have a vivid imagination, so I wouldn't give it to a kid younger than at least 10.

This is my second book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list and my 49th for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022!

"The Convivial Homeschool" by Mystie Winckler -- Guest Review

I reviewed The Convivial Homeschool for the homeschool blog Blest the House this week -- you can read my full review here.  Overall, I found it very helpful and encouraging.

I want to share my favorite parts here with you so you can get a taste of how good this book is.  And so I can refer to them whenever I need them.

Particularly Good Bits:

Our job isn't to figure out how to make everything go smoothly and easily; it's how to glorify God in all things (p. 14).

Tears are a normal response to difficulty.  However, we don't want to shelter our children from encountering difficulty.  Experiencing and overcoming hard work and natural consequences at home is a vital training ground for adult life when they will not have a mom smoothing their path for them (p. 22).

Our goal is to walk in step with the Holy Spirit, not to make each and every homeschool day conflict-free.  The goal needs to be handling inevitable conflict with the fruit of the Spirit (p. 24-25).

Sometimes homeschooling becomes not just our pet project but the core of our identity, causing us to take situations personally.  As Christians, our real identity is in Christ... Homeschooling is one way we serve God; it is not a part of who we are as people (p. 42).

...we think that choosing to homeschool means we are assuming control of and responsibility for how our children turn out (p. 47).

Being merry and festive is not the same thing as being lazy or carefree.  It is being cheerful and enjoying life while doing the work of life (p. 60).

Homeschooling is no solution to sin.  It does not prevent sin in any way.  It just changes the setting and the temptations (p. 76).

Even as we disciple our children through the phases of growing up, we, too, are being shepherded through our own idealistic, stubborn, or discouraged seasons by a Good Shepherd who knows exactly what we need and where we're going (p. 103).

It turns out that homeschooling is work.  It's much more than teaching; it is providing the structure that allows our children to build their work ethic and responsibility muscles (p. 109).

Not a single one of us is patient enough to homeschool (p. 159).

Kindness is love in little things, in our entire way of life with one another (p. 166).

Most of what we, as mothers, do all day is mundane: read a book, correct a child, make a meal, sweep a floor, change a diaper.  Our days are full of small tasks, but their smallness does not mean they are insignificant.  It is in these ways that we faithfully love our families; by loving them, we also faithfully love and glorify and enjoy God (p. 183).

Our role is not to impart everything they need to know... Our role is to see them, hear them, train them, love them, and hold them accountable (p. 194).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.  No objectionable content here.

This was the 48th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Crown and Cinder" by Kendra E. Ardnek

This is another completely delightful mashup of Jane Austen and a fairy tale!!  In fact, I think I liked this Pride and Prejudice -meets-Cinderella story even better than book one in this series, Rose Petals and Snowflakes.

Lizzy is a Cinder, which means things catch on fire if she touches them too long, and she can control fire to some extent.  She also has ties to the Forest, which was controlled by the evil Mistress until the events of the previous book.  The Mistress tried to use Lizzy to infiltrate the society of her home kingdom, so Lizzy has refused the status of her noble family and taken on the role of a servant in her family's house just to spite the Mistress and thwart her plans.  

Lizzy is very wary of the new Gardener, who seems to have a kindly interest in Lizzy and her stepsister Janet, but can she be trusted?  When three royal balls throw Lizzy and Janet into the paths of King Darren and his friend Liam, the sisters discover that love and status don't have to be mutually exclusive.  But their chances for happiness are threatened by a relative, Collin Wick, who is bent on destroying King Darren and taking his throne.  

Once again, Ardnek has tangled Jane Austen and fairy tales in a clever and charming way to create something totally new and magical.  I am eagerly awaiting the next book in this series!

Particularly Good Bits:

"There's nothing nobler than doing the task set before you" (p. 112).

This king had no business being so distractingly handsome and strong (p. 203).

Life could be a fairy tale, after all (p. 214).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for a tense and perilous ending involving a dragons.

This is the 47th book I've read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.