Last year, we signed up for a Rick Steves tour of the Adriatic. With all the upheaval of 2025, we hadn’t been traveling much, and this was something to look forward to. I’d been wanting to go to Croatia for a long time, and on the tour we’d see as much of it as possible,…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is about new-to-me authors I want to read. I initially made a list, based on the books that have been sitting on my shelf too long, and then I realized that those are the authors I think I should read, not authors I want…
I had mixed feelings about Villa Coco, but that’s mainly because I loved Less and Less is Lost so much. Villa Coco is largely what it sets out to be — a light, hopeful, atmospheric novel about a young man in a strange land with eccentric companions. Greer describes this in an Author Letter: Whatever happened…
I had some issues with this memoir but overall found it informative and thoughtful. Nović describes her experiences as a child losing her hearing, as a woman navigating health care and other systems, and as a mother of two boys, one hearing and one deaf (Nović explains that both hard of hearing and deaf are…
Hello readers, and a happy holiday weekend to those in the U.S. The heat is pretty unbearable here in the DC area, but tonight we’re heading to a Washington Spirit game (with fans and water bottles). Hope you’re staying cool where you are! In June we traveled to Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia/Herzegovina on a 2-week…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is the new releases coming out in the second half of 2026 that we’re most excited about. Heartstopper Volume 6 by Alice Oseman (July 7, 2026) Some People by Parini Shroff (July 7, 2026) Destination Funeral by Paige Harbison (July 21, 2026) City of…
If you like stories about space and different alien species, combined with a mystery, you should enjoy this one. This is the first in a three-book series about Mallory Veridian, a woman encountered murder wherever she went, so she decides to live on an alien space station where there are no humans. The book is…
The Running Man is a novella written by Stephen King under the name of Richard Bachman. It was published in 1985 as a book of four stories called The Bachman Books, after King’s pseudonym was revealed. As King explains in an introduction, they are dark in a way his horror books are not, relying much…
Last March, I left my 22-year job with the Department of Education. I chose to take early retirement when my other options included being laid off, transferred to another agency, or working for an administration that clearly wanted to destroy the agency. Ten months ago I took a job as a teaching assistant in a…
I loved this book about a group of people who take a cruise from Boston to the Bahamas right after September 11. Yun contrasts the fear and chaos of Boston and New York (and the rest of the country) with the strangely sheltered world on a cruise. The employees of the cruise company are charged…
In May, I visited family in Phoenix, and Mr. CG and I went to a Washington Spirit game, a rosé tasting, and celebrated the Memorial Day weekend with our closest friends. I worked on my garden, though the weather’s gone from ridiculously hot to ridiculously cold – and we have to replace our fence so…
The only TBR list I follow every year is for the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge (#20BOS26), hosted this year by AnnaBookBel. I already put enough pressure on myself to finish my ARCs, to post reviews, to complete challenges — so a TBR list can be just one more box to check. What I…
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