This month, Amazon Prime members are able to pick two free books from a selection of ten from a variety of genres.
I picked these two:
There’s Something About Mira by Sonali Dev – a novel about Mira Salvi, whose perfect life is interrupted in an exciting way when she finds a lost ring and goes on an adventure to try to find the owner.
The Art of Starting Over by Heidi McLaughlin – a later in life romance between Devorah Campbell, whose marriage fell apart when her husband cheated on her, and Hayden McKenna, who lost his wife a year ago.
I’m not sure when I’ll get to them because I have so many books ahead of them on my TBR, but they both sound promising.
In this 2015 memoir, the late Rachel Held Evans shared her journey with church – how she got to the point of leaving the church she had loved and how she struggled with where she belonged after that. The book is structured around the seven sacraments of the Catholic church: Baptism, Confession, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage. Each section has several chapters where her personal story is woven in with a discussion of the theme.
I really appreciated how Evans shared both the positive and the negative of her experience with church. She did not paint the conservative church she grew up in as all bad by any means, but she also didn’t shy away from the problems she came to have with some of the beliefs and behaviors she encountered.
After spending some time away from church entirely, she found herself longing for community and began searching for a church where she could experience that alongside people who were also willing to question and examine what they believed. This quote seems to sum up what she was looking for:
Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.
I can relate to her struggle with finding yourself in a place that does not align with your beliefs, but then feeling a sense of loneliness and disconnection when no longer inhabiting that space. I am thankful that I have been able to find a community of faith that allows me to be myself while also challenging me to grow even more.
2024 was a great year for reading for me. I set a goal of 52 books and blew past it, finishing at a total of 99 books. Also, in the last few years I have not read much nonfiction, but in 2024 I finished 13, up from 4 the previous year.
Without further ado, here are my top 10 reads from 2024:
No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister
The Sister Effect by Susan Mallery
Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookstore by Bo-Reum Hwang
Puzzle Complaints is a 500-piece puzzle from Workman Puzzles, and the artist is popular children’s book author Sandra Boynton. I had done this puzzle very close to when I started puzzling in 2021 and decided to redo it to bring in the New Year.
It is such a fun puzzle! I love all the different sayings and the complaining chickens. The text around the border of the puzzle is pretty amusing as well.
A brand new year – so exciting! It’s fun to look back on the year that we have just finished as well as to look forward to the next twelve months.
What I’m Reading Now
I currently have three books out from the library, so I am listing them all under this section. Hopefully I will finish them all before the due dates!
The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society by Darien Gee
What I Recently Finished
Fiction:
The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg
The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick
Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev
The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers
The Handmaid and the Carpenter by Elizabeth Berg
The Healer’s Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson
Return to Bella Beach by Kate Wentworth
Miss Amelia’s List by Mercedes Lackey
Nonfiction:
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans
UnClobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality by Colby Martin
Short Stories:
When We Were Friends by Jane Green
The Answer Is No by Fredrick Backman
Cruel Winter with You by Ali Hazelwood
Merry After Ever by Tessa Bailey
All by My Elf by Olivia Dade
Merriment and Mayhem by Alexandria Bellefleur
Only Santas in the Building by Alexis Daria
What I Added to my TBR
Happy After All by Maisey Yates
The Autumn of Ruth Winters by Marshall Fine
One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery
Wedding at Bella Beach by Kate Wentworth
My Friends by Fredrik Backman
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry by Beth Allison Barr
Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table by Brandan Robertson
The Year of What If by Phaedra Patrick
The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance by Jemar Tisby
What Happened to the McCrays? by Tracey Lange
Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop: A Memoir by Alba Donati
Never Meant to Stay by Trisha Das
Christmas at the Little Paris Hotel by Rebecca Raisin
A Bookshop Christmas by Rachel Burton
The Second Chance Year by Melissa Wiesner
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
How to Read a Book by Monica Wood
Plymouth Undercover by Pamela M. Kelley
TBR Stats
I currently have 120 books on my TBR
Of those, 20 are nonfiction and 100 are fiction
All of the books were added in 2024
One of my goals for 2025 is to read 2 nonfiction books each month. I usually set an overall goal on the Goodreads Reading Challenge as well. Last year, I put down 52 and I ended up finishing 99 books. This year, I may be a bit more ambitious and put down 75.
If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!
I don’t read a lot of memoirs, so these go back quite a few years, but I highly recommend all of them.
House Lessons: Renovating a Life by Erica Bauermeister – I have greatly enjoyed her novels and equally loved this memoir of her time renovating a house and starting her writing career. Both topics were equally fascinating.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb – I finished this in one day, it was so good! She shares about her experiences with therapy, both as a therapist and as a client, and it was captivating.
I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag: A Memoir of a Life Through Events – the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don’t by Jennifer Gilbert – While Jennifer’s story centers around a painful experience, her writing is filled with the determination and hopefulness that she has fought to recover in her life. In addition to her insights about her personal journey and close relationships, we also see how she brings the lessons she has learned to her professional life as an event planner.
Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber – A journey from agnosticism to Christianity. The story takes place over the course of a year and is set against the backdrop of time spent in graduate study at Oxford University in England, far from her home in Canada. Highly recommend the book as well as the movie that followed.
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Riechl – So well written and such an intriguing account of how a food critic lives. I loved hearing about the food she encountered but also the disguises she created in order to get regular treatment when she went out to eat for a review.
The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of the Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure – I found this memoir to be extremely enjoyable and fascinating. I greatly appreciated the writing style as much as the content and laughed out loud at least a dozen times during the course of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to any and all Little House book fans.
I had such a nice Christmas this year. My company was closed on the 24th and 25th, and I took the 23rd as a floating holiday, so with the weekend I had five days off. It took me a while to get my apartment decorated this year, but I finally did it and was able to enjoy my tree and other decorations for a couple of weeks leading up to the big day.
Michael was with me on Christmas Day this year, and we slept in until around 10am and then opened our stockings and gave each other presents. I decided that I wanted to have Michael be in charge of filling my stocking starting next year and when I told him that, he wanted help shopping for me this year to add to the couple of little things I had bought for myself. I thought that was very sweet.
For presents, Michael gave me two puzzles – one for Christmas and one for my birthday. He picked them from my Amazon wish list, so I definitely liked them!
In addition to his stocking stuffers, I got him a set of Pokemon books, a Lego set, and a new keyboard for his computer. I usually get him a video game, but he only had one on his list this year, and his dad got it for him. I did put gift cards for Nintendo and Steam in his stocking along with a bunch of different treats.
Peanut Butter got a small squirrel stuffed with catnip. I think he liked it!
After we opened presents, I made us French toast for breakfast and then got started on dinner, which was a turkey breast with assorted sides (different for each of us based on what we like). Later that day, I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special, so that was fun. All in all, it was a very good day!
The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick is a charming take on what to do when faced with sudden divorce. When Ginny Splinter’s husband tells her he wants a divorce, she impulsively invites four of her radio show listeners to join her on a trip to Italy that was originally planned as a trip for her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Each of her fellow travelers is facing their own heartbreak, which we learn more about as the novel unfolds.
The group meets up in a quaint hotel called Splendido and gets to know the owner and his daughter while they enjoy the beautiful surroundings. They take several day trips to scenic and historical spots around Italy as well as engage in various activities suggested by each of the members. As they begin to share their stories with each other, they form friendships and offer each other support and understanding that helps them start to move forward through their grief.
I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of the Italian culture and countryside, and I appreciated how much Ginny grew in her understanding of her marriage and herself throughout the trip. The ending was especially good, in my opinion, but I won’t say more than that because of spoilers!
One of the perks of having Amazon Prime is getting a free book each month from a short list of editor’s picks. Sometimes we get a bonus short story or even a second book for free. It’s a great deal, and even better because I have Amazon Prime at a discounted price since my son is on Medicaid.
Here’s what I have added to my Kindle for free over the last six months:
July 2024 – We could choose two free books that month, although I ended up only picking one of them. I chose The Bookstore Wedding by Alice Hoffman. It is the second in a series of short stories called The Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories, so I also purchased the first story, The Bookstore Sisters, and pre-ordered the third one, The Bookstore Keepers.
August 2024 – We got one book free plus a short story. I chose Fatal Intrusion by Jeffery Deaver and Isabella Maldonado for the book. The short story was Natural Selection by Erin Hilderbrand. I have read the short story and it was good but I would have liked it to be longer.
September 2024 – We got one book free plus a short story. I chose The Anti-Heroes by Jen Lancaster for the book. The short story was When We Were Friends by Jane Green.
October 2024 – We were able to pick two books from the list that month. I chose When We Were Widows by Annette Chavez Macias and Grave Talk by Nick Spalding.
November 2024 – We were again able to pick two titles from the list. I chose Nobody’s Perfect by Sally Kilpatrick and The Answer is No: A Short Story by Fredrik Bakman.
December 2024 – We were able to pick one free book from the list and, after that, we got to pick a free book out of another list. I chose Happy After All by Maisey Yates and The Autumn of Ruth Winters by Marshall Fine. The Amazon original short story collection Under the Mistletoe is also free this month for Amazon Prime members. There are five stories, so I downloaded all of them. From the descriptions, it sounds like they might be a little bit spicier.
All together, I got seven free books and nine free short stories. Not bad!
Winter Lights is a 500-piece puzzle from Galison, and the artist is Joy LaForme. This was a gift from my friend Kim. She is really good at picking out puzzles I like, and this one is no exception!
It is kind of hard to see from a photo, but the puzzle has gold foil accents on it, which are so festive. I enjoyed putting together all of the buildings and vehicles most of all. The image is a bit dark, but it wasn’t too bad to work with.
In So Many Words 