Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep on day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the […]
Category: reads
Looking Forward: September 2020
Into another month and somehow we’re nearly three-quarters of the way through 2020. Madness. To distract yourself from your own insanity (I’m blaming mine on cabin fever), here are some cool books you should consider adding to your TBR! World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Fumi Nakamura As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places […]
W&C: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
‘Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father.’ A chief of the Osage said in 1928. ‘There’ll be no fine motor cars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.’ p. 26 Before the nitty gritty of this […]
Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
Suicide isn’t the only way you can lose someone to depression. Übermensch to Darius, p. 286 A four hour read that’s a lot more uplifting than the above quote suggests. I loved this book from its front cover to its end. Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social […]
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. […]
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
I wanted to immerse myself and be preoccupied with nothing Sequoyah, pg. 58 With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family, Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep […]
Looking Forward: August 2020
Even with moving, working, and life-changing, I’m still making time for reading. Hopefully, I’ll figure out how to make some more time for writing and reviewing soon too! This month though I’m excited to get these books on my shelf: The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi What does it mean for a family […]
W&C: The Guest List by Lucy Foley
There’s a lot going on in my life right now (as I’m sure is obvious by the lack of posts) but I can’t deprive this site of W&C. The Guest List was a book that I wavered on. I mean Reese Witherspoon likes it but I also bought Where the Crawdads Sing because of her […]
W&C: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The most famous true crime novel of all time and one of the first non-fiction novels ever written; In Cold Blood is the bestseller that haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by […]
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
This book is in my top ten contenders for this year’s best novels. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, souther black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their […]