2.17.2021
Find it HERE on Amazon
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
A girlfriend recommended that I read this, and I’m so glad she did! Even if you’re not a tech geek, or Silicon Valley native, if you love books you will be blown away by this bookstore mystery combined with computer coding genius!
Part fantasy, part technology adventure, this New York Times bestselling novel stirs up the old and the new, the ancient and the futuristic. It’s an exciting journey all wrapped up in a cozy bookstore and secret literary society.
Robin Sloane delivers an entertaining, smart read that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before!
10.20.2020
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
In a word, this book is enchanting … Duchess Goldblatt made me laugh, and cry, sometimes at the exact same time. I encountered her on Twitter and was instantly intrigued. I hit “Follow” and over the next several weeks, continued to be wowed and delighted by her witty yet literary banter and generosity of spirit. She is always looking to uplift. Always a source of sunshine. Just what the rest of us out in this cold, harsh world need. Exactly my kind of gal.
If you love magical words, you’re going to love this book. A self-described fictional personality, Duchess Goldblatt has an ability to come to life alongside us mere mortals.
The world leans to the dark and frightening; our moral imperative is to crowd together on the side of light and joy, and rock it over. – Duchess Goldblatt
You can read my blog about encountering Duchess Goldblatt.
BOOK JACKET SYNOPSIS: Part memoir and part joyful romp through the fields of imagination, the story behind a beloved pseudonymous Twitter personality reveals how a woman deep in grief rebuilt a life worth living. Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is two stories: that of the reclusive real-life writer who created a fictional character out of loneliness and thin air, and that of the magical Duchess Goldblatt herself, a bright light in the darkness of social media.
Fans around the world are drawn to Her Grace’s voice, wit, life-affirming love for all humanity, and the fun and friendship of the community that has sprung up around her. @DuchessGoldblatt (eighty-one-year-old literary icon, author of An Axe to Grind) brought people together in her name: in bookstores, museums, concerts, and coffee shops, and along the way, brought real friends home – foremost among them, Lyle Lovett. You can order it here on Amazon.
8.18.2020
While our vacation plans may have changed this year, we can still escape with a good book – and this story promises to warm your heart. From time to time we all have our fears that we are unlovable, and some of us have built up walls to protect ourselves. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine unfolds with humor and compassion for the brave of heart – even the quirky ones! ~A
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
– A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick
From Amazon: Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.
But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .
6.30.2020
It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read – the language and culture jump off the page and right up in your face. All of our relationships –between husband and wife, parent and child, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers – are deeply explored, turned over and over and examined from every direction … and yet sometimes left unresolved, just as painfully as in real life.
I’ve been carrying it around in my heart and mind ever since. (That’s how I know a story has buried itself in my mind, when I think about it long after I finished the last page.) Bottom line, this is now one of my favorites and I plan on returning to it again and again.
In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends.
Nainoa’s family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods―a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family’s legacy.
When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawai’i―with tragic consequences―they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.
4.30.2020
I loved this one because it’s a throwback to old school, European literature but written with an updated modern feel. I got lost in the story, swept up in the history of post-revolutionary Russia brought to life by completely engaging characters I became totally invested in. In these days of self-quarantining, we can probably relate now more than ever to house arrest and its effect on the psyche – and the choices, big and small, that we make in order to live with intention. ~ Love, A
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin.
Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
A mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series.
4.02.2020
~ Love, A
Here’s the scoop: In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together incarnate the poet’s timeless message of love.