BJ's 2025 Reading Journal

January

1 The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger 428 pages This one felt really long. Don’t get me wrong, I was into it, but it dragged.  It was about a murder that happened somewhere in Michigan in the 1950s. There was a guy in town that a lot of people didn’t really like and he got murdered. So It was a matter of which person that hated him did the deed. 

2. Mr. Mecedes by Stephen King 538 pages This one also felt a little long. It was good, but in classic Stephen King fashion it was long. And it’s part of a 3 book series so I wonder how many hours I’ll read when I read the other two. It’s about Bill a retired detective somewhere in the Midwest. So it didn’t take place in Maine, which is weird for Stephen King.  So when he was still an active detective there was the case that he never solved, and it was a crazy one. This man stole a car and drove it into a crowd of people lined up at a job fair. He killed a bunch of people with the car and then drove away and ditched the car.  The killer still lives in town and he starts to torment the retired detective, prompting him to try to figure out who the killer is.  It’s cool to see King embrace a lot of more modern aspects of life than I am used to seeing from his books I read in the 80s and 90s, as a lot of the tracking down and tormenting was happening online. 

3. The Five Year Lie by Sarina Bowen 434 pages I was totally into this one. Ariel is a young 20 something woman working for her father’s company, which is a doorbell cam manufacturing company. The father is a complete asshole, not very popular. One day she gets completely dressed down by him at work, and one of the men there sees it happen and befriends her. Of course they fall in love, and then all of a sudden he just disappears.  Then later on she sees his obituary, after she’s given birth to his child that he never knew about.  They were in love and poof!  Gone! Then 5 years later she gets a text from him.  She learns that there was some hiccup with a local cell phone tower and everyone got a text from someone 5 years ago.  This text triggers her to investigate what happened to this guy. Then she uncovers that he isn’t at all who he said he was, and that there are some insanely nefarious things going on at work which also led to the murder of her father. I was riveted. This was a standout read for January.

4. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali 333 pages I blew through this one for book club and I really really enjoyed it.  It takes place in Tehran from the 1950s-present day. Ellie and her best friend Homa are young girls when they meet in school in the 50s. It was a time in Iran when women were encouraged to go to school, and Homa declared she would someday be a judge and they’d be the lion women of Tehran who would change the world. When they entered university in the 60s things in Iran started to change. Sweeping changes in government threatened the rights of women in the country and Homa would not stand for it. She protested and made a name for herself as an activist until she’d been arrested for it. Ellie feels responsible for Homa’s arrest and horrible mistreatment while in prison. It’s a story of enduring friendship during a time of chaos in a country they call home. Very worthwhile read to give us all insight about how Iran was able to so radically change. This was a standout read for January.

That’s it for January. I’ve read 4 books and a total of 1,733 pages.

February

5. Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski 390 pages I think I need to read this one again, there’s a lot going on in this one. It’s all about the science behind female sexuality and how to approach the concept that we all have the same body parts yet they work differently from woman to woman.

6. Young Rich Widows by Kimberly Belle, Layne Fargo, Cate Holahan and Vanessa Lillie  347 pages I LOVED that this one took place in Rhode Island in the 80s.  RI has a storied history of organized crime. In fact witness protection was started here in RI because of all the organized crimes that were going on.  In this story the 4 women who were the wives/partners of 4 partners in a high end law firm are brought together because a plane crashed killing all 4 of their spouses.  Immediately after the plane crashed a local notorious mob boss started harassing these women for the $4 million that their spouses owed him. The story takes us through these women all figuring out that their spouses weren’t who they thought they were, and also through the underworld of organized crime and the very shitty things that mob bosses did in the 80s to keep control and get ahead. Very good read.

7. Happy Place by Emily Henry 395 pages Meh, this one was OK. This is about Harriet and her group of college friends. Every summer they vacation together at Sabrina’s family vacation home in Maine.  Harriet and her boyfriend, also a member of this group, have broken up. But they go on the vacation and don’t tell anyone they’ve broken up because this year Sabrina and her boyfriend, another group member, are going to get married  at the end of the week.  But they keep getting put into situations that wouldn’t have bothered them if they were still together. It’s a story about a group of tight friends who are growing apart, growing up, figuring out what they want in life. 

8. Finders Keepers by Stephen King  558 pages This is the second of a series, the first one is Mr. Mercedes, which I read a the end of last year. It takes place in the same town, only different things are happening.  Back in the 70s Morris Bellamy robs his favorite author, who he thinks is a sell out. He steals all the money and dozens of notebooks of unpublished work. He kills the author and his accomplices, and then hides the loot in a cave in his town. Then he goes to prison for a long time for something unrelated. Years later a teenager named Pete finds the truck in the cave. His family is struggling financially, so he anonymously mails the cash to his parents bit by bit until it’s gone.  Then Morris gets out of prison and goes back to get his loot, only to find it’s gone. So of course he has to track down who took it and aggressively try to get it back.  Good one, long but good. 

9. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins  311 pages This is not what I would have normally picked, it was a book club read, but I really liked it. The Let Them Theory is a way for people to control their reaction to the world around them and disappointing or crappy things that happen to them in it. The idea is if someone is doing something you don’t like you say “Let them” and then in response to it you say “Now Let me…” Like for example when you learn that a friend has said mean things about you behind your back you say “let them” and then “let me now focus on the people who wouldn’t say bad things about me.” Or even “Let me reach out to that person and make sure that they’re OK maybe something is wrong…” This is something I’ve worked to employ in my life long before reading this book to deal with my reaction to people in my life who haven’t exactly been nice to me as well. It is freeing, it does help to say “Oh, this person is behaving that way. That wouldn’t necessarily be my choice. But let them.”  Remember, we cannot control other people, only our reaction to them.

And that’s it for February. Let’s get to March. I’ve now read 9 books and a total of 3,734 pages

March

10. The People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry 382 pages This one was OK, it didn’t grab me. It’s basically the story of When Harry Met Sally.  Poppy and Alex meet in college, and even do a road trip back home to Ohio like the characters in When Harry Met Sally had done. They are best friends but are really in love with each other.  Poppy’s job is a travel writer and she takes Alex along on her trips. And I am unclear why they just didn’t go with their feelings from the very beginning.

11. Good Morning Monster by Catherine Gildner 356 pages I saw an amazon review that said this book is trauma porn. It basically is just that. Catherine Gildner is an actual therapist in Canada, and this collection of stories are basically about her most messed up clients. Again, I am glad that this all took place in a country other than the US. I kind of feel like everything truly messed up seems to happen in the US.

And that’s a wrap for February. I have read 11 books and a total of 4,472 pages.

March

12. Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera 338 pages OMG, yes please! Listening this one is a better experience than reading it I would think.  Lucy is from a small town in Texas, and has been accused to stabbing her best friend to death. She has no memory of the event, as they’d all been drinking. She was just found with Savvy’s blood all over her and scratches and bruises.  She has not been convicted because there isn’t actual evidence that she’s even done it. She has to go back home to Texas for her grandmother’s 80^th birthday party, but while the party prep is happening there is a true crime podcaster in town investigating the murder. So the chapters alternate between Lucy’s story moving forward and the podcast episodes—this is why listening to it was a great experience, it was a lot like Someone Knows Something. So Lucy gets interviewed by the podcast guy and agrees to help him, after all she needs to clear her name. And then of course they figure out what happened that night. But it’s super cool to hear all the interviews of everyone in town who has a theory and an opinion. Loved it. 

13. Brave by Rose McGowan 258 pages. Rose McGowan was a moderately successful actress in the late 90s early 2000s. I think she was more famous for being Marilyn Manson’s girlfriend and she wore that naked dress to the MTV Music Awards that time. What we didn’t know about her at the time was that she was one of Harvey Weinstein’s assault victims. Rose McGowan was one of the women who not stepped forward but leapt forward to bring this guy down at great risk to their careers. She’s incredibly angry at the Hollywood industry and it’s treatment of women actors. And her story I hope will help making things more equitable for women actors.

14. The Sea by John Banville 210 pages. This was a book club read, and that was the only reason why I ever finished it. It was insufferable. I don’t even want to tell you what it was about because I don’t even care. 

15. Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle 268 pages This one was a little strange. So all her datable years Daphne would occasionally receive a note that would have the name of a man and a length of time, 2 years, 3 months, 5 weeks, etc. Somehow someone is giving her these notes to tell her how long she will date this guy. So then that’s how her life goes. What bugs me is that we never find out where she is getting these notes from, but her whole life she doesn’t seem to have a “choice” as to how long she’s with these people. It was a super weird concept that didn’t really resolve why it was happening.

And that’s it for March, I have read 15 books and 5,546 pages.

April

16. One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle 268 pages Katy’s mom Carol passed away, and Carol was Katy’s best friend. She decides to take the trip to Positano Italy that she and her mom had planned. Positano was a place where Carol went when she was younger and that one summer was life changing for Katy’s mom. So Katy goes and then she meets a woman named Carol who looks just like her mother did then. Then she realizes that she’s also traveled back to 1992 to the summer when Carol was there, and gets to know her mother as a younger woman. As someone who has lost her mother, who wouldn’t want this situation to play out? I would love to be transported to a time when my Mom was younger and get to know her as a woman instead of as my mom.

 17. Sociopath by Patric Gagne 365 pages This is a memoir of Patric Gagne, who is an actual diagnosed and functioning sociopath. She takes us through her childhood and realizing that the way she responds to things in life isn’t quite the same as everyone else. She starts to research sociopathy and realizes that there is next to nothing about sociopaths other than the people who are criminals. She learns that there are more people like her, sociopaths who are trying to figure out how to have a normal life. She describes what it’s like to combat the urges to do bad things and takes us through how she established ground rules for herself when her pressure gets to be too much. Like, she breaks into houses on her own to scratch the itch of her sociopathic pressure. Very interesting look into how she figured out how to exist as a functioning sociopath, and how in her practice as a psychologist she helps others in the same situation.

18. All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whittaker 586 pages I finished reading this one on our sailing vacation. And it was awesome. Patch is a kid in the 1970s with one eye, he wears an eye patch. His best friend, a girl named Saint, is also a misfit, and they live in a small town in Missouri. When they are teenagers Patch saves another girl from getting kidnapped. He gets stabbed trying to fend the guy off and the girl escapes while he gets taken by the kidnapper and held in a dark place. While he’s being held in complete darkness he makes friends with a girl named Grace who is also being held. He grows very attached to her. In the mean time Saint is trying to find him and she is going crazy with it until he finds out where he is being held. She figures it out and goes there to confront the kidnapper and a fire in the house breaks out. Patch gets free, and he never sees Grace again. He spends the rest of his life trying to find Grace, despite the fact that everyone tells him he conjured her up as a way to cope with such a traumatic event. Saint becomes a cop to help him find Grace as well, as his best friend she always believes him. An amazing story that spans like 30 something years. Loved it.

19.  The Guilty Couple by CL Taylor 337 pages I read this one on our sailing vacation. The story starts with Olivia being found guilty of attempting to murder her husband, and she goes to prison for 5 years. The thing is, she didn’t do it. Sure she had an affair, and increased his life insurance so that doesn’t look great, but she didn’t hire a killer off of the dark web. The husband framed her and she knows it. So she gets out of prison and she sets out to prove that he set her up. Over the process of trying to figure it all out she realizes that he is not at all who she thought and the plot gets crazy.

20. Yellowface by RF Kuang  332 pages I read this one on our sailing vacation. This isn’t what I was expecting at all and it was terrific! June is an author whose career never took off—not in the way her frenemy Athena Liu’s did. And June is jealous as hell, but remains friends with Athena anyway.  One night they’re hanging out in Athena’s apartment when Athena chokes to death. June calls 911 and then she grabs one of Athena’s unpublished manuscripts. She publishes it on her own.  But the thing is, she’s white and the book is about Chinese soldiers in WWI. She then has to face all the backlash of appearing to pretend to be Asian and publishing this book. Super interesting. 

21. Scarred by Sarah Edmonson 231 pages I read this one on our sailing vacation. And of course, if it’s about cults I am in! This is the story of the woman who helped bring down Keith Reniere and the NXIVM cult. She talks all about how she came to join the group all the way through getting branded with Reniere’s initials. Which, come on, I looked at the picture of that for half a second and could see his initials. This just goes to show you the power of persuasion and belief that she didn’t see it until someone else brought it to her attention. And also? How did they expect her to keep the brand from her husband? It was a story of falling in and then getting out and then healing. I do listen to her podcast A Little Bit Culty as well. 

22. From Here to the Great Unknown by Riley Keogh and Lisa Marie Presley  284 pages I read this one on our sailing vacation. I am not such a big Elvis fan. I was always more drawn to the story of Priscilla Presley and how at age 16 her parents were like “yeah, cool, go visit Elvis for like a month and we’ll stay here in Germany.”  Like, what?  This is a memoir that uses the tapes by Lisa Marie Presley, recorded before she passed, and Riley Keough, who is Lisa Marie’s daughter. It was a super interesting look at what it was like to grow up as Elvis’ daughter and Elvis’ granddaughter. 

23. Earth to Moon by Moon Unit Zappa  368 pages This is the memoir of Frank Zappa’s oldest child. I was never a huge Frank Zappa fan. But years ago, when I was a teenager, I read Pamela DesBarre’s memoir “I’m With the Band” which is a story of her life as a groupie in the 60s and 70s. Pamela mentions being in an all girl band that Frank Zappa started. And she mentioned hanging out in the Zappa household with Gail and a very young Moon Unit.  In this book Moon Unit actually mentions Pamela. At any rate, this is the story of growing up in what you can imagine is the world’s weirdest household. But it also dives into the family conflict among the Zappas. Gail is portrayed by Moon Unit as the long suffering rock star wife who never completely has her husband’s attention and endures his many affairs. She leans heavily on her oldest, Moon Unit, to the point where Moon Unit never really gets an identity of her own. She’s the one who picks up her mom’s pieces all the time. In her later years she tries to develop her own career as an actress. Remember when she and her brother Dweezil were MTV VJs? I do! It’s about Moon Unit becoming her own person after being the one who never really got to do what she wanted for the sake of her parents egos and happiness. 

24. Verity by Colleen Hoover 333 pages I had read this one years ago and recently re-read it for a book club that I didn’t even go to because I was on vacation. Lowen is an author who has had very moderate success. She is presented with an opportunity to ghost write a book for a very famous and successful author who has become incapacitated as a result of an accident. The famous author, Verity Crawford, has an unfinished series that she is still contracted for, and we cannot leave all those readers hanging on a cliff.  Lowen agrees to move to the Crawford household in Vermont where she immerses herself in Verity’s work. She gets to know her husband and her child. But she has this feeling that Verity might be faking the extent of her injuries. She stumbles upon an unpublished memoir written by Verity and finds her confessional nature in it incredibly disturbing. To the point where Lowen is completely freaked out by this woman. She ends up falling for the husband, but what should they do about Verity? The ending is a total mind scrambler. A very good book. Worth the hype.

I have read 24 books and 8,650 pages.

May

25. Miranda Fights by Gail Ward Olmsted 261 pages There’s something awesome and sad about getting to the end of a trilogy. Like, I love seeing the story get all wrapped up and everything is all tidy. But them I am sad that I can’t read about these characters anymore In this one Miranda Quinn is a lawyer working for legal aid, specifically with teens who have had their share of legal troubles and trying to help get them on the right track again. One of her clients is the daughter of an old friend from high school she’d had a falling out with. Via this daughter she learns that there is a ring of sex traffickers kidnapping young women from the group home where this daughter lives. Together the two of them figure out where the girls are going and help bring it all down. I absolutely LOVE the Miranda Quinn character, she’s such a badass. I will miss this series. A lot.

26. The Wedding People by Alison Espach 355 pages I read this one for a  book club and never got the chance to discuss it. Phoebe arrives at a fancy historical hotel in Newport, it’s where she’s always dreamed of staying, but the thing is she is coming here to kill herself. Her husband has left her, her career as a professor is on a downward swing, and she checks in to the hotel. But when she arrives she sees that a wedding is happening at the hotel this week, hers is the only room where someone who is not a guest to the wedding is staying. In the elevator she meets the bride and is asked whether she is a guest of the groom and she simply replies “Nope, I am here to kill myself.” Later in the evening the bride comes to check on Phoebe and then sits down to confide in her.  Over the course of the next few days the bride confides more and more until she starts to invite Phoebe to the pre-wedding events. It’s a very cool story of realizing that you are more than your failures, and a story of finding family in unexpected places. Loved it.

27. The Unseen World by Liz Moore 452 pages Ada is a child of a very famous scientist and professor in the 1980s.  He is a single father and is raising her on his own with the help of his community of fellow scientists. When dementia settles upon him she realizes that her father isn’t who she knew him to be. She slowly learns who he really is, and of course because dementia has settled in she simply cannot get straight answers from him. He left her a code on a computer disk that she cannot manage to figure it out. She spends her life well into adulthood trying to figure it out, until she finally does. It’s an incredible mystery and absolutely fascinating.

28. An Inspiring Recovery by Neil McCarthy 207 pages This is a very honest and brave memoir by a man who endured a psychotic break when he was 19 and in college. He had everything going for him, the grades, the bod, the friends, and then the sexual abuse he endured as a young child caught up to him in a spectacularly awful way. He takes us through what it was like to learn to manage his condition. He detailed his ups and downs, his successes and failures, and how he learned his own strategies to manage his condition but to also accept himself and his condition. This was an incredible story and I sincerely hope that more people with bipolar who are recovering from childhood trauma. This book is full of hope, and it’s full of “You’re not alone, you can do it, here’s how I did it.” Very well done.

That’s it for May. 28 books and 9,925 pages read.

June

29. Looking for Smoke by KA Cobell 416 pages Thousands of women from American and Canadian indigenous tribes have gone missing. And this is a problem that largely goes unnoticed.  This book is about a group of Blackfoot teens who are being investigated because two girls, their peers, have gone missing and were murdered. Awesome story and it kept me guessing until the end.

30. Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez 342 pages This story is told in two perspectives, one from an upcoming artist from the 1970s named Anita de Monte who was killed by her more famous artist husband. Everyone knew he killed her but he was acquitted. And the other perspective is an art history student at Brown named Raquel. Raquel struggles with being latino on a campus that is mostly white in the 90s and finding her place in a world where people assume she didn’t earn her spot just like every one else. We learn of Anita’s story, a Cuban refugee, finding her own place in the predominately white art world. Raquel discovers Anita while studying her husband and becomes fascinated with the story of what happened to Anita before and after her death. A very inventive story.

31. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead 673 pages. OK, I was pretty into this one and I read it on my June offshore sailing trip. It’s not a true story, but based upon real events. Marian Graves is a twin growing up near Missoula, Montana. She and her brother lost their mother in a ship sinking accident at which her father was the captain, and later jailed for his failure in sinking the ship. As she grows up, raised by an uncle, she becomes obsessed with becoming a pilot. She works as a booze runner during prohibition to earn for her pilot lessons, when a rival bootlegger decides to pay for her lessons. But there are strings attached. It’s all about how this woman has to figure out how to get to where she wants as a woman learning to do things that men typically only do, all with this benefactor who ultimately wants to ground her and keep her all to himself. It was an awesome book.

32. Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman  380 pages Bess, Joni and Evangeline were best friends from a privileged neighborhood in a suburb of Los Angeles. They take off to Evangeline’s family vacation house in Greece the summer after graduating high school. During that summer Evangeline dies and Joni and Bess are accused of her death. They are cleared of any wrongdoing, however this summer follows them for the next ten years, kind of like an Amanda Knox situation. Then 10 years later Joni randomly knocks on Bess’ door because her partner has gone missing. Bess attempts to help the friend that she hasn’t spoken to since that summer in Greece, all the while wondering if Joni had something to do with Willa’s disappearance. And whether Joni had something to do with Evangeline’s death 10 years earlier. Awesome. 

33. Throwback by Maurene Goo 362 pages Sam is a Gen Z Korean girl with the classic problem: she and her first generation mother do not see eye to eye on anything. Her mother wanted to be homecoming queen back in the day, but didn’t get it. Sam gets the opportunity to go for it but doesn’t want it like her mother did. They get into a fight at the mall, and she gets onto a rideshare app to get to school. But she realizes it’s a different kind of rideshare app, as it drops her off at her school in 1995—back when her mom was a student there trying to be the homecoming queen. Sam has to right the wrongs of her mother’s past, while posing as a new friend so that she can get back to 2023. Cute, funny, insightful on race relations in the 90s and how they compare to today.

That’s 33 books and 12,098 pages read

July

34. The Disappearance of Sloane Sullivan by Gia Cribbs 400 pages. Did you know that witness protection was started in Rhode Island because of all the organized crime we have here? Years ago I watched a show on the USA network called In Plain Sight, which was about US Marshalls who were working with people who were put into the witness protection program. What a fascinating concept! You just leave your life and assume another one so that you won’t be in danger because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw the wrong thing. This book is about a teenage girl who is hiding out with her own Marshall. She has changed her identity 19 times. She is alone in the world, taken from the life she knew when we was 12 because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw the wrong thing.  She’s learned to always be aware of her surroundings, to defend herself, and to never say too much about who she is or where she’s from. She knows her parents are dead, she has no siblings. Then she moves to a new town with her Marshall when on the first day of school she meets her childhood best friend who she had to leave behind when they were 12. And the last thing she wants to do is to tell her Marshall, but she can’t have any links to her past or else “they” will find out where she is. An awesome book with one hell of a twist.

35. Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood 397 pages This is a memoir by a woman whose family moved aboard a sailboat when she was 6, and they lived aboard and sailed the southern Pacific for over a decade. The adventure started in 1976 when the dad decided they’d follow Captain Cook’s 3^rd voyage to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of it, because “if he didn’t commemorate it then who would?” Ultimately the trip ended up being kind of a nightmare for her. Literally. They got caught in a massive storm between Africa and Australia and she suffered a head injury, which she had nightmares about for the remainder of her childhood. She wanted to live a “normal life” on land where she’d go to school and make friends. But the parents wanted to take on paying passengers and sail all over the south Pacific.  When she was a teenager the parents left her and her brother in a cottage in New Zealand where it was her job to care for her brother and make sure he went to school, all while she was only allowed to do her schooling via correspondence. The parents didn’t seem to really care about what her interests were as she got older, and she was repeatedly called selfish for wanting to study. Very interesting story.

36. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld 434 pages This one was really great. Sally is a writer on a show that’s like SNL when she starts a fun flirtation with the musical guest. But she isn’t so great to him and bases what she knows about him on what’s in the tabloids. So what was a promising romance ended up getting totally messed up. But you know that’s not the end of the story, and the story was pretty great how it was done. Loved it.
 

37. End of Watch by Stephen King 511 pages This was the last in a 3 part series. I was into it, but in pure Stephen King fashion it was long. The story got weird and supernatural, of course, which isn’t always my thing. But this one was super interesting. So Bill Hodges continues to be tortured by bad guy Brady Hartsfield. Brady got found guilty of all the things, but he got so brain damaged over the course of taking him down that he had to get put into a special hospital. In that hospital the doctor was secretly giving him experimental drugs. Then weird things started to happen, he was able to move things in his room and freak people out when he was bedridden. Then he could jump into other peoples’ bodies, and that’s where the crazy began.
 

38. The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan 301 pages I absolutely loved this one. Cate Kay is an author and she released a massive best seller, but she is keeping her true identity a secret. She’s keeping it a secret because when she was a teenager her best friend was in an accident and she fled the scene and left her friend. So over the whole story she’s in hiding to overcome the grief and the guilt. She never really knows what came of her friend, but she knows she can’t go back there and cannot live a life in public. Such a great premise and amazingly done.

That’s 38 books and 14,141 pages Hey, that number is a palindrome! 

August

39. The Crows of Bennett Road by Marcus Soutra 178 pages Loved this one! This was written by my teacher in high school Mr. Soutra, he taught me psychology and sociology. Back when we were in school we didn’t really notice what the lives of our teachers must have been like. And that’s because we were self absorbed teenagers who only cared about getting our homework in on time and getting our grades and getting the boy we liked to notice us. But this book tells us all about what it was like to have a teaching career that spanned over 40 years, and how the society around high schools have changed in that time. He also talks about how his personal life affected his teaching career and vise versa. An awesome read, and I could hear his voice all the way through it.
 

40. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry 427 pages Alice is a writer trying to find that one famous person to get in with and write about. She manages to track down a reclusive heiress, Margaret Ives. Margaret was the daughter of a media magnate, and wife of a famous musician in the 60s, and just constantly unwillingly in the spotlight. Then she removes herself from public life and Alice tracks her down. On the same day she gets to interview Margaret, another writer, Hayden, who is also interviewing her for his own book. Of course Alice is irritated and intimidated, this guy won a Pulitzer for another biography after all. Margaret puts the two against each other and allows them to interview her for 2 weeks and then make their pitch to her and she will decide which writer will get the job. They aren’t allowed to speak to each other about what they learn, but eventually they each uncover parts of Margaret’s secrets until the two writers fall in love. A refreshing and original story, loved it.

41. The Business Trip by Jessie Garcia 341 pages I was super into this one. Jasmine is escaping an abusive relationship and she gets on a flight to Denver. She’s seated in the same row as Stephanie, a woman on her way to a work conference. Another passenger asks if they are sisters because they look so much alike. When Stephanie gets up to use the bathroom Jasmine decides to steal her identity and try living her perceived glamourous life. But then murders happen, and Jasmine has to figure out how to cover everything up and it all spirals way too far out of control. 

42. Isola by Allegra Goodman 343 pages This one was based upon a true story that took place in the 1500s. Marguerite is French royalty, and her parents died when she was young. Because she’s a woman alone she has a male cousin who is her guardian who makes all her financial decisions for her, and of course she has no idea what he’s doing with her money and of course he does whatever the hell he wants with it. He invests in exploring the new world and decides to take her with him on the trip. While on the trip she and his right hand man fall in love, and the guardian isn’t psyched about that. So he abandons them with her made on a tiny island off the coast of Canada where she lives for two years and figures out how to survive and outlives everyone else. It is an incredible story of how someone who was incredibly sheltered gathers her strength and learns how to survive in one of the harshest climates in the world.  Then she gets rescued and gets to pay back the karma. An awesome story.

42 books read and 15,430 pages

September

43. The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan 610 pages This one was good but ridiculously long. Sullivan goes into the back story of every little thing. You can tell she researched the hell out of Native American tribes in Maine because she has to tell us every little thing she learned about them. It was interesting, but kinda like get on with it. In the story Jane starts out as a teenager and she comes upon an abandoned house on the cliffs in her hometown. She visits it often over the course of her teen and adult years. She returns to her hometown when she’s older, and needs to heal. Her marriage has fallen apart as a result of her alcoholism, her mother died and she needs to clean out the house. A family bought that house on the cliff and the wife asks her to research the people who lived there. So we get the whole story of those people all while Jane is healing. Good but long.

44. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon 420 pages This is the second time I am reading this one to refresh my memory for a book club. I love this book. I love everything about it. It’s about a woman who is a midwife in a small Maine town, based on a true story, and she helps everyone with their medical issues. One of her friends is raped by 2 prominent men in town and Martha has to testify in court about it. But one of the rapists ends up murdered and her son is one of the suspects. It was an awesome story and all the facts of the story were based upon the real Martha Ballard’s daily diary entries. Martha Ballard is also the great aunt of Clara Barton.

45. Something In Between by Melissa de la Cruz  448 pages This is a story about a teenage girl about to graduate from high school when she wins a very prestigious scholarship. The thing is she can’t accept it because her parents just told her that they’re all undocumented. Now that she knows this life has become incredibly complicated. She has to keep this secret. Her new boyfriend is the son of a congressman who hates undocumented immigrants, and it’s gotten chaotic. I think this book was super unrealistic. Like she ends up telling the boyfriend and he’s like “My dad can help.” So the dad, who hates undocumented immigrants just helps? I don’t think that would happen in real life. 

46. All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett 376 pages This had a very modern day Jane Austen vibe to it. Anna is an American grad student studying in London. She tutors on the side and she’s just barely squeaking by. She gets a student from a very wealthy family. Then she gets invited to go with them to St. Tropez for the Christmas holidays so she can tutor the girl some more. Then she gets wrapped up in the trust fund elite friends of this family. She ends up hiding who she really is for the sake of fitting in with this circle of people and of course it all comes crashing down. It was fun to listen to this one, but I didn’t relate to this main character at all. Like, be who you are. You can hang out with rich people without having to be something you’re not and lie about who you are. If they were truly people that are worth hanging out with then they would accept you for you.

Books read and 17,284 pages

October

47. How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang 382 pages this one was a light read, but man the sex scenes were super hot. So Helen’s sister Michelle committed suicide when they were in high school by jumping in front of another student’s car. Of course the parents blame this boy for her daughter’s death. Years later Helen is a successful author and her series is getting made into a TV show. Her relationship with her parents is super strained, of course, as none of them have ever gotten over Michelle’s death. When she goes to the writer’s room in the show she learns that the boy who was driving the car is one of the writers that she has to work with. It’s super awkward at first, neither of them want to talk about the connection they have. But then they start to hang out, and then they start to fall for each other. 

48. Did You Hear About Kitty Karr by Crystal Smith Paul  408 pages I  loved this one. It was about a Hollywood black family. The mom is an actress, the daughter is also a famous actress. The daughters were left a massive estate by a white actress who had died and while she was a close friend of the family nobody really knows why she left this estate to these daughters. The story then splits and tells us about Kitty Carr, who we learn is a light skinned black woman passing as white—to the point where not even her husband knew. I am so fascinated by the concept of passing as white and what it meant at the time and how risky it was to be black passing as white in 1950s and this story dives into how it worked and what it all meant. Absolutely fascinating.

49. The Unwedding by Ally Condie  329 pages this one was OK, it kind of dragged. A woman just got divorced and goes to the resort where she and her husband planned to spend their 20^th wedding anniversary because it was super expensive and non refundable. There’s a wedding going on, and she and another guest she befriended decide to crash a wedding event. Then she goes into the pool and finds the groom dead and floating in the pool.  Then a massive storm comes through and the only road to the resort is blocked by a mudslide so everyone is stuck at this resort. Then somebody else gets murdered and she’s stranded at a resort with strangers and people are getting murdered and she has no way of contacting anyone outside.

50. The Club by Ellery Lloyd 303 pages Home is an exclusive club where famous people belong. You’re not allowed to bring your phones in, and it promises discretion and time away from prying eyes. They’re opening a new branch called Island Home which is on an island in England. It’s opening weekend of Island Home, and this story is told from a few perspectives. At first you know that people were murdered at the opening weekend, but we don’t know who. There’s a maid who wants to kill a famous actor because he killed her parents in a drunk driving accident. Seems like everyone wants to kill the CEO of Home, and honestly he’s a jerk. So we get to follow along as these people who pretend to like each other actually really don’t and want to murder people. It was well done, but it got kind of convoluted to the point where I wasn’t even sure who killed who at the end.

51. An Honest Lie by Tarryn Fisher 351 pages. I really liked this one. It has it all, an exclusive group of friends in a wealthy neighborhood, a cult, a girls’ trip gone wrong. So, the main character is Rainy. She just moved to Washington state to be with her boyfriend. She joins this group of women because he’s concerned that she needs to be social. But she knows she definitely doesn’t fit in with these women. They invite her on a girls’ trip to Vegas and she doesn’t want to go, but she relents and goes. But she has a history in Vegas: when she was a child she and her mom got sucked into a cult and she managed to get out. The cult was just outside of Vegas. Then at the end of the trip one of the women starts acting very strangely. She disappears and her texts are super weird. So Rainy has to know figure out where she is and what’s going on. And what’s going on definitely isn’t good.

51 books read and 19,047 pages

November

52. Here for the Drama by Kate Bromley  351 pages This one was super cute. So Winnie is an assistant to a very famous playwright, and she is also an aspiring playwright. She goes to London with her boss because they’re doing a revival of one of the boss’ old shows. The boss is uninspired as of late and asks Winnie to go on a variety of Tinder dates and report back on the weirdos she meets so her boss can get fodder for a new play. But in the meantime Winnie meet’s her boss’ British nephew and starts hanging out with him instead. Then the whole thing goes crashing down. She is falling for the nephew. The request by the boss is super inappropriate of course, and Winnie starts to see her boss for who she really is, a toxic narcissistic boss who will never help Winnie with her own career. So then she has to figure out where she wants her life to really go to with regards to love and her career. I like this one because it was something different and interesting. 

53. Mother -Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon 368 pages Lana is ill and needs to move in with her daughter in northern California. Her daughter Beth has a daughter of her own, Jack. Jack is a guide for the local kayak touring company when she comes across a body in the water where she leads her tours. Then grandmother, mother and daughter get into investigating the murder on their own when the finger is pointed at Jack. It was pretty awesome to see Lana and Beth work through their past issues and help Jack. And I love how badass Lana was in dealing with people who potentially committed the murder. Awesome story. 

54. State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny  506 pages This is exactly what you’d think a novel written by Hillary Clinton would look like. It was a great story, about a woman who is serving as Secretary of State when terrorist attacks start to happen in cities all over the world. A low level employee gets an email about them that is written in gobbledy gook that she initially deletes because it just looks like spam, and then she realizes it contains a clue to when the next attack will happen. The story goes where the Secretary of State is in the position where she needs to figure out how to prevent the next attacks and figure out who is behind them while dealing with sexism and a mole in the White House. Great story, but the details dragged it down a bit.

55. The Golden Doves by Martha Hall Kelly 529 pages Martha Hall Kelly has done it again. This book was awesome. It takes place just after World War II with women who were detained in the Ravensbruk concentration camp. The two women during the war worked with the French resistance and ended up getting caught as they were stealing information from local Nazi soldiers and then transmitting the info to the British. After the war they figure out that a lot of the Nazis have escaped justice and one of them starts tracking them down. The other one is trying to find her young son who was taken from her at the camp. When she is promised that she will be reunited with her son she learns that a former Nazi doctor is still up to no good after the war and she uncovers the whole thing. Very well done.

So far I have read 55 books and 20,801 pages.

December

56. The Whisper Network by Chandler Baker 352 pages At the beginning I wasn’t sure about this one, but I stuck with it. It’s about a group of women who work in the legal department of a big corporation when they become aware of a spreadsheet that is circulating in the Dallas community which features men in the local business community who have exhibited bad behavior. These women have all been a victim of their boss who died over the course of the story. And they all are struggling with the notion of how or even whether to grieve the guy. It’s a story about women fighting for each other and sticking together. I ended up kinda liking this one.

57. Class Action by Gail Ward Olmsted 255 pages This is a spin off from here Miranda series. Lennon Gallagher is a law student and mentee of Miranda Quinn. Lennon joins a study group where she encounters the group leader who has stolen a copy of the Constitutional Law exam and tries to get her involved in purchasing it from him. Of course she doesn’t, but she is implicated in it anyway. On top of that, Lennon is financially holding on by her fingertips, her mom is fresh out of prison and is demanding of her time, and her boyfriend doesn’t understand the pressures she’s under in her last semester of law school and trying to finish school, take the bar exam, find a job and a place to live. An awesome story and Olmsted ratcheted up the stakes.

58. I’ll Take You There by Wally Lamb 259 pages. This one was short and sweet, unlike his normal books that are massive. I remember an interview with Wally Lamb where he said that he’d met an elderly woman who read his books, and made the size of them more manageable by tearing out each page after she’d read it. Didn’t have to do that with this one. This is a story of Felix Funicello, he’s a professor of cinema and an older gentleman. He goes to his movie night at the local theatre, and something super odd happens. There are ghosts of women from old Hollywood and they show him movies of his life from when he was a child. He tells us about pivotal moments of his childhood and how they shaped him as an adult and later taught him how to be a supportive and awesome dad to his daughter. A pretty cool story to end the year.