It’s the Cannonball Read 10 Holiday Book Exchange! I didn’t get ANY books reviewed this year (and because of stupid “1Q84,” I also didn’t quite meet my reading goal this year… I’ll probably only get to 49/52), but I love this community and still played the book exchange game! And guess what? I WON!(J/K… we all won.) My amazing Santa, CoffeeShopReader got me the best gift, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, which, like, is even better because my Santa last year got me the sequel and […]
Put down the Google. All the answers you’re looking for are in this book.
I received Does It Fart? for my birthday from my sister and brother-in-law, who know that I like to read all manner of animal-related information. “It’s a bit silly,” my sister warned. Silly, perhaps, but also revelatory. I often stick post-its on the pages of books I’m reading to help me locate the interesting bits when I’m writing my reviews (I can’t bring myself to underline), and I’ve applied a remarkable number for such a short (133-page) book! The Introduction explains why the authors decided […]
“Conflicted” would have been a more accurate title
Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]
…sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over
Just enough time to slip a review in under the wire! This is a book club book for me and I was looking forward to reading it. I liked it, but didn’t love it, which was a surprise given all of the great reviews it received. It took me a while to read, but really shouldn’t have. It’s not a long or complicated book. I’m not sure if that was because I was fitting it in around holiday goings on or if it wasn’t engaging […]



