Reader’s Corner

[Songbird76]

I finished the christmas tree farm and then moved on to a non-fiction book about a distant Jane Austen relative who grew up in the house where Jane spent her last few years and where she did most of her writing. It was interesting, but not a whole lot about Jane herself, which was a little disappointing.

I'm having a rough time and need some comfort reading, so I just finished Sense and Sensibility last night and I'm going to start Pride and Prejudice.

 

[StarWarsGirl]

My most recent read was “Magic Hour” by Kristin Hannah

View attachment 823404

Set in the 2000s, this book is about a small town in Washington state, just outside of Olympic National Forest. One day, a young girl walks out of the forest - she is severely malnourished, and cannot/will not speak. The town sheriff enlists the help of her younger sister, a disgraced child psychologist, to try to help the little girl and figure out who she is. This was my fourth Kristin Hannah book in 2024 - she has quickly become one of my favorite authors. If you have enjoyed any of her other books, I’d highly recommend reading this one as well.

I read that one a while back. She's also one of my favorites, though I still have the read the Women.

 

[k8einwdw]

My most recent reads:



“The House in the Cerulean Sea” is about Linus, who is a caseworker for the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. He gets an highly classified assignment to spend a month observing and reporting back on an orphanage that houses some of the most unusual/potentially dangerous magical children, including a female garden gnome, a forest sprite, a dragon, a boy that has the ability to turn into a dog, and…the child of Satan himself. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this one, as I’m not normally a fan of fantasy, but I really loved it. It is a heartwarming story about acceptance and found family.



“Pachinko” is about four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, and takes place from the 1930s all the way through the 1980s. This one was…long. And sad - it felt like the entire plot was just one bad thing after another happening to the family. Like many Korean families living in Japan in the 20th century, they faced discrimination from native Japanese. Even after WW2 and the Korean War were over, and even after the younger generations of the family rose above their circumstances and achieved education and wealth, they still faced that same discrimination. I can normally finish a book in under a week, but this one took me two. It’s a good book, and well written - just tough to read.

 

[Songbird76]

My most recent reads:

View attachment 826676

“The House in the Cerulean Sea” is about Linus, who is a caseworker for the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. He gets an highly classified assignment to spend a month observing and reporting back on an orphanage that houses some of the most unusual/potentially dangerous magical children, including a female garden gnome, a forest sprite, a dragon, a boy that has the ability to turn into a dog, and…the child of Satan himself. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this one, as I’m not normally a fan of fantasy, but I really loved it. It is a heartwarming story about acceptance and found family.

View attachment 826677

“Pachinko” is about four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, and takes place from the 1930s all the way through the 1980s. This one was…long. And sad - it felt like the entire plot was just one bad thing after another happening to the family. Like many Korean families living in Japan in the 20th century, they faced discrimination from native Japanese. Even after WW2 and the Korean War were over, and even after the younger generations of the family rose above their circumstances and achieved education and wealth, they still faced that same discrimination. I can normally finish a book in under a week, but this one took me two. It’s a good book, and well written - just tough to read.

I LOVE TJ Klune. House in the Cerulean Sea is so good! I need to read the sequel. Have you read u Under the Whispering Door? I sobbed for that last 100 pages, I swear, but it was so so good. In the Lives of Puppets was cute, but not as good as his others I've read.

 

[k8einwdw]

I LOVE TJ Klune. House in the Cerulean Sea is so good! I need to read the sequel. Have you read u Under the Whispering Door? I sobbed for that last 100 pages, I swear, but it was so so good. In the Lives of Puppets was cute, but not as good as his others I've read.

This was the first TJ Klune I’ve read, but I definitely plan to read more!

 

[Songbird76]

I finished P&P, which I always love...I can read it over and over.

I just read How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent

It was....twisted. It wasn't as fun and light-hearted as I was expecting. It was fine. I didn't DISLIKE it, but it wasn't as good as I had hoped. None of the characters are really likeable. They are all pretty self-absorbed. They are mostly social media influencers, but they all grew up in wealthy families, so they already had names for themselves before they started "influencing" and they are just superficial, immature jerks. The idea of the revenge killing of some truly horrible men was meant to be funny, but I guess in some ways I feel like it went a bit too far. And there was a lot of graphic content, and some things could be triggering for some readers. I feel like there's definitely a target audience who would love it, but I'm not in that group.

 

[Songbird76]

I just started Murder In The Family by Cara Hunter. It's a unique setup...it's not like prose. It's more like a case file. You get pieces of evidence like snippets from text, interviews with people, news articles, etc, and you are supposed to try to figure out who did it before the "experts". I like it so far, though it takes me a bit longer to read because I'm trying to decipher the evidence as I go. But it seems interesting.

 

[NiarrNDisney]

Picked this up for the Holiday

 

[erstwo]

I bet a lot of you have read this one as well. It’s a retelling of David Copperfield.
It’s just as hard to read - maybe even more so- realizing we haven’t come far in how we support and care for orphans.
A hard read that made me take a good look at myself and what good I am doing (or not doing!) in the world.

 

[Tiki Traveler]

I just started Murder In The Family by Cara Hunter. It's a unique setup...it's not like prose. It's more like a case file. You get pieces of evidence like snippets from text, interviews with people, news articles, etc, and you are supposed to try to figure out who did it before the "experts". I like it so far, though it takes me a bit longer to read because I'm trying to decipher the evidence as I go. But it seems interesting.

It sounds like the modern, adult version of The Encyclopedia Brown series which I loved as a child. Interesting!

 

[Songbird76]

It sounds like the modern, adult version of The Encyclopedia Brown series which I loved as a child. Interesting!

I never read the Encyclopedia Brown series. I remember it was popular, which was why I never read it. The books were really hard to find in the library, always already checked out. So I never got ahold of them.

This one turned out to be a huge letdown for me. I had worked out almost all the things they did in those ending pages pretty early on in the book, but there were things that didn't add up. Some alibis weren't completely checked out, for example. Had I been on the case, that would have been one of the first things I'd have checked on, and the police never did. Also some motives that were never thought of/considered, that I also thought of very early on. I think the police work would have had to be pretty shoddy not to think of some very obvious things, and not just police, but the experts in the panel as well. No one asked these questions, which seems a HUGE oversight to me. So then I was actually feeling pretty good about myself to have figured it out, even though it seemed like they had kind of dropped the ball not to have gotten there sooner. But on the VERY last page, AFTER everything has been revealed, there's a clipping from a newspaper that basically calls it all into question. I read that bit and was confused by it, so I googled a couple of things and there are all sorts of theories about things, which means I'm not the only one who was confused by that last bit. And while not all the theories are plausible, there is enough ambiguity to make me question whether the "big reveal" was even the big reveal. Did they get the right person in the end? I still have several questions. So it was disappointing.

 

[Tiki Traveler]

I never read the Encyclopedia Brown series. I remember it was popular, which was why I never read it. The books were really hard to find in the library, always already checked out. So I never got ahold of them.

This one turned out to be a huge letdown for me. I had worked out almost all the things they did in those ending pages pretty early on in the book, but there were things that didn't add up. Some alibis weren't completely checked out, for example. Had I been on the case, that would have been one of the first things I'd have checked on, and the police never did. Also some motives that were never thought of/considered, that I also thought of very early on. I think the police work would have had to be pretty shoddy not to think of some very obvious things, and not just police, but the experts in the panel as well. No one asked these questions, which seems a HUGE oversight to me. So then I was actually feeling pretty good about myself to have figured it out, even though it seemed like they had kind of dropped the ball not to have gotten there sooner. But on the VERY last page, AFTER everything has been revealed, there's a clipping from a newspaper that basically calls it all into question. I read that bit and was confused by it, so I googled a couple of things and there are all sorts of theories about things, which means I'm not the only one who was confused by that last bit. And while not all the theories are plausible, there is enough ambiguity to make me question whether the "big reveal" was even the big reveal. Did they get the right person in the end? I still have several questions. So it was disappointing.

Good to know. I won’t waste my time then. (I have more than enough books to read as it is. ) Thanks!