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What I Read This Week – July 26th

This week I only finished 2 books. I try to read 1 nonfiction book every month, and this week I read my nonfiction selection for July. Even though I do want to read nonfiction, I still have a mental block that makes me resist picking it up and diving in, so having the objective goal of 1 per month helps me stay accountable.

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Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry by Beth Allison Barr

This book gives an account of how we have seen women in ministry treated in the Bible to medieval times to the present. The present/recent history deals mainly with the SBC, a conservative denomination in the US.

I have to admit I skimmed some of it, but I did find it very interesting how women have been moved out of leadership roles into often unpaid, non-leader ministry, especially in terms of the role of the pastor’s wife.

If you are looking for a good discussion of women in ministry, this is a good choice. For more general info on how women are treated in conservative circles, check out her earlier book The Making of Biblical Womanhood, which I highly recommend.

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Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory

I loved this one! The characters were so well done and the relationships (both friendly and romantic) were so realistic. I really enjoyed her writing style, and I appreciated that even when there were miscommunications, they weren’t cringe-inducing but instead opportunities for growth and honesty.

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Solena

I ran across this puzzle at a local thrift store recently and was intrigued enough to bring it home. It was packaged in a cylinder, which is unusual for puzzles, and the brand was called Remember, which I had never heard of. After a bit of Googling, I found out that it is a German brand featuring design and gift items. They currently have 8 puzzles on their website, all of which have abstract designs like this one.

The puzzle was fun to put together, but the pieces do have a fairly loose fit. Because of this, I had some false fits in the beginning. Once I knew to look carefully at whether a piece actually fit where I was trying it, I got better at recognizing when it was in the right place. The pieces were rigid and had a black backing, both very different from the puzzles I am used to.

Here is a picture of the packaging the puzzle came in:

I would enjoy doing more Remember puzzles, although I don’t know if I will ever get the chance. You can get them through Amazon, but they are prohibitively expensive. I didn’t realize the deal I was getting for $4.99 at the time I bought it!

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Diamond Dahlia

Diamond Dahlia is a 500-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Josie Lewis. I think this is a perfect example of a rainbow puzzle. It is so satisfying to do a puzzle where I can start with one color and work my way around.

The white lines in the design along with the shading of the colors made it easier to place pieces than I thought it would be, although the red and pinks were very similar and took a bit longer than the other colors.

I really want to get one other puzzle of hers, Rainbow Sunrise. It is out of stock everywhere I’ve looked, though, so I’ve got an alert set up on ebay in case one shows up there. Here’s a picture of that one:

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Hickory Haven Canal

Hickory Haven Canal is a 1000-piece puzzle from Buffalo Games, and the artist is Charles Wysocki. This one was a Christmas present from my son. 😊

If you do puzzles for any length of time, you will most certainly come across Charles Wysocki and his Americana/folk art scenes. I am drawn to them partly because of my love of buildings, which are very common in his images, but I also just like the general feel of them.

Sometimes they have large areas of one color, like a green meadow or a field of crops, and for those I tend to prefer a smaller piece count so they won’t be super hard. Even though this image has a lot of snow, there is enough going on all over the puzzle that it was not too hard to do as a 1000-piece.

All that to say this was a very enjoyable puzzle, and I’m very happy that Michael got it for me.

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Wine Country Camper

Wine Country Camper is a 750-piece puzzle from Ceaco, and the artist is Stephanie Peterson Jones. This charming puzzle is part of the Happy Camper series, and I was really happy to get a hold of it. The series is mostly 300-piece puzzles, with just a few larger ones, and I was glad to finally track down a copy of this one at Poshmark (not a place I expected to find puzzles!)

This was such a fun puzzle to do! I love all the colorful elements and different textures. I will definitely be doing this one again and again!

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What I Read This Week – July 19th

Three books per week seems to be my sweet spot. Since I have started posting weekly updates, all but one has had three books on it.

Here’s what I finished this week:

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Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center

I loved this book! The story centers on Helen, who signs up for a wilderness survival course in an attempt to take back her life after a divorce. Although there is a romantic plotline, this book is much more than that, and I felt challenged and inspired by her adventure and the things she learned about life through the experience and the people she met along the way. Highly recommend and now I’m going to watch the movie!

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How to Find Love in a Bookshop by Veronica Henry

This is a charming novel about a woman who tries to keep her dad’s bookshop running after his death. The story goes back and forth between the present day with Emilia and the cast of characters living nearby and the past where we learn how she came to be.

I have to admit there were almost too many characters in this one for me; I kept getting Mia and Emilia mixed up. That could be because I was switching between this physical book and another book on my Kindle app, so I wasn’t giving it my full attention. Also, I have read so many books about bookshops lately that they are starting to blur together. Those things are on me, though, so I would definitely recommend reading this one.

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More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

This was a nice follow up to the first book. I liked hearing what was happening with the characters I had grown fond of and even found myself liking the main character’s aunt Momoko better in this one.

What is your favorite book that you have read recently?

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Amsterdam Weekend

Amsterdam Weekend is a 1000-piece puzzle from Antelope Puzzle, and the artist is Lynn Weilin. I have done a couple other puzzles from this brand, and one of them was actually from this same artist. I continue to be impressed by the quality of this brand, and the image is perfect for me.

I love all the different colors of the buildings and how they each have their own style of windows and doors. The street/park scene in the front is a nice addition so it’s not *all* buildings.

I am totally open to doing more from Antelope, but they just don’t have a lot of images that appeal to me.

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Sugarplum Village

How’s this for Christmas in July? The finished puzzle looks really nice, but I actually won’t be keeping this one in my collection. It was my first puzzle from this brand, and the pieces had a weird feel to them that was unpleasant to me.

The colors were also quite muted, which made it more difficult. The tree pieces look much more gray than green, for example. I do like the image, just didn’t enjoy the puzzling experience as much as I usually do.

Sugarplum Village from Puzzle Weekend, 1000 pieces
Artist Sabina Fenn

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What I Read This Week – July 12th

I finished 3 books this week. It could have been 4, but I kept jumping between 2 different books, so they are both half-finished.

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Incense and Sensibility by Sonali Dev – The Rajes #3

I really enjoyed this one. I felt it had more similarities to Austen than the previous book in the series did, and I loved getting into Yash’s story. I am looking forward to book 4.

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The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland – Lost for Words #1

I actually read the second book in the series before I was aware this one existed, but I don’t think I lost too much by reading them out of order. This book centers on Loveday, who is in the second book but not the main focus. She has had a lot of sadness in her life and the book shows how she struggles to overcome it, flipping back and forth between the past and the present. It has some heavy themes, especially of domestic violence.

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Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand – Paradise #1

Hilderbrand’s books are usually a quick read for me, and this was no exception – I read it in one sitting the other afternoon. I enjoyed this story of a woman whose husband dies but turns out to have had many secrets. It was a fun story, and I am looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

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Spring and Summer Gnomes

Spring Gnomes and Summer Gnomes are 500-piece puzzles from Bits and Pieces. They are part of a set of 4 puzzles I got a while ago. Last year I did the fall and winter puzzles, and I was recently inspired to finish these ones off.

These two were definitely more fun than the other ones. The fall one was tricky, but the winter one was diabolically hard between the random cut pieces and the many shades of white and gray. The summer puzzle was the easiest of the four because it has more colorful elements that are spread out more throughout the design.

While these are very cute puzzles, I don’t think I would want to do them again, so the set is going in the stack for the next puzzle swap I am able to attend.