Redhead Said
Redhead's Reading
Ever since graduating college, I noticed that I have a lot more free time and a lot fewer reading assignments. After years of collecting books from numerous places and always assuring myself that, “I’ll read them one day,” I decided that monthly book reviews would be a great way to work through my collection.
With these reviews, I like to share what stood out to me and made me think, give proper credit to the authors, and hopefully give readers a way of finding new books to read.
I hope you enjoy these book reviews for your own enjoyment and possible reading list inspiration. I’ll warn you if I spill any spoilers, I promise!
January- The Shack
Author: William P Young
Pages: 256
Three words: heartbreaking, uplifting, revolutionary
Quote: “...don’t forget that in the midst of all your pain and heartache, you are surrounded by beauty, the wonder of creation, art, your music and culture, the sounds of laughter and love, of whispered hopes and celebrations, of new life and transformation, of reconciliation and forgiveness. These also are the results of your choices, and every choice matters, even the hidden ones.”
February- Scandalous Women
Author: Elizabeth Kerri Mahon
Pages: 304
Three words: witty, surprising, telling
Quote: “In five thousand years of recorded history, from the ancient world to the present day, women have caused wars, created drama, defied the rules, and brought men to their knees.”
March- A Bend in the Road
Author: Nicholas Sparks
Pages: 432
Three words: foreshadowing, emotional, romantic
Quote: “Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen.”
April- The Time Traveler's Wife
Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Pages: 537
Three words: nonlinear, suspenseful, heart-wrenching
Quote: “‘This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?’
‘We can be quiet together, and pretend… that we have all the time in the world.’
‘And every day we shall have less. And then none.’
‘Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?’
‘No. This is where I have always been coming to… And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.’
-A.S. Byatt, Possession”
May- Heads by Harry
Author: Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Pages: 311
Three words: native, familiar, vibrant
Quote: “To make everything exactly the way I wanted it was the challenge... You hear me, Toni? The challenge. And in the end, I look at my work. Was the best I could do.”
May- A Woman of Independent Means
Author: Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Pages: 276
Three words: native, familiar, vibrant
Quote: “Our lives are all on loan and none of us knows when the mortgage will fall due.”
“Life is our only defense against death.”
June- True Believer
Author: Nicholas Sparks
Pages: 322
Three words: mysterious, descriptive, unlikely
Quote: “As unlikely as an event might seem, as long as it is theoretically possible, it more than likely would happen sometime, somewhere, to someone.”
July- Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
Author: Cornelia Otis Skinner
Pages: 195
Three words: descriptive, humorous, reflective
Quote: “...and the date June 10th, the year of our Lord I shan’t say which, because Emily and I have now reached the time in life when not only do we lie about our ages, we forget what we’ve said they are.”
July- One Italian Summer
Author: Rebecca Serle
Pages: 272
Three words: inviting, sincere, unexpected
Quote: “The understanding that she is gone now… She will not call. She will not hold me anymore, her arms enveloping me in her certainty, her presence. There is so much life ahead to lead without her, and she is gone.”
“I hope you find the peace and confidence it takes to trust where your path leads. Remember, it is only yours. Others can wave and cheer, but no one can give you directions.”
August- The Ragged Way People Fall out of Love
Author: Elizabeth Cox
Pages: 203
Three words: confusing, emotional, charming
Quote: “If he had a diary (which he knew he would never have), he would put in it things he did each day but wouldn’t write down anything he thought about. He would never put his thoughts on paper, even if he kept it locked. So as Franci read to him, his ideas about physical bravery changed, because he knew he could not measure up to her kind of courage.”
September- The Little Paris Bookshop
Author: Nina George
Pages: 392
Three words: unexpected, sympathetic, adventurous
Quote: “I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors… The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.”
October- The Silent Patient
Author: Alex Michaelides
Pages: 323
Three words: brilliant, inticing, informed
Quote: “I keep feeling the need to get out of the house. When I’m around other people, even if it’s only the bored waitress in here, I feel connected to the world somehow, like a human being.”
October- American Psycho
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Pages: 399
Three words: monotonous, horrible, reflective
Quote: “An hour later. We’re still debating. We have canceled the reservation at Kaktus and maybe someone has remade it. Confused, I actually cancel a nonexistent table at Zeus Bar. Jeanette has left her apartment and cannot be reached at home and I have no idea which restaurant she's going to, nor do I remember which one I told Evelyn to meet us at. Van Patten, who has already had two large shots of Absolut, asks about Detective Kimball and what we talked about and all I really remember is something like how people fall between cracks.”
October- Homegoing
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Pages: 300
Three words: familial, meaningful, genuine
Quote: “The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad”, this thing “white” and this thing “black”, was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.”
November- The Woman Inside
Author: E.G. Scott
Pages: 325
Three words: tragic, vengeful, mysterious
Quote: “I pause on the picture of my twentysomething-year-old self momentarily to marvel at the beauty of my own young body, and regret not appreciating it while I had it.”
December- Christmas Everlasting
Author: Nora Roberts
Pages: 315
Three words: cheesy, satisfying, resemblant
Quote: “He'd picked up an affection for scuba and white sand, but had never felt that a palm tree replaced a pine at Christmas.”
“Nell didn’t believe in running if walking would get you to the same place.”
December- Silent Night
Author: Mary Higgins Clark
Pages: 177
Three words: suspenseful, touching, just
Quote: “He'd picked up an affection for scuba and white sand, but had never felt that a palm tree replaced a pine at Christmas.”
“Nell didn’t believe in running if walking would get you to the same place.”
January- The Devil in the White City
Author: Erik Larson
Pages: 447
Three words: historic, surprising, local
Quote: “... the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become.”
February- Then We Came to the End
Author: Joshua Ferris
Pages: 400
Three words: casual, funny, realistic
Quote: “Our scope was infinite, our reach almighty, our knowledge was complete. Goddamn it, sometimes it felt like we were God. Was it such a blasphemy? We knew everything, we had terrible powers, we would never die.”
March- Women, Work, and the Art of Savoir Faire
Author: Mireille Guiliano
Pages: 272
Three words: reassuring, informative, honest
Quote: “Controlling one’s fears and anxieties by not letting them dictate premature decisions is part of a solid professional skill set. And especially in tough economic times, fear has the tendency to try to pull us by the nose, something that’s hard to fight, but being aware of it helps.”
April- Nevermore
Author: Harold Schechter
Pages: 336
Three words: imaginative, accurate, mysterious
Quote: “Here, I reflected dully, is the gruesome confirmation of an all-too-dismal truth: that nothing in the realm of supernatural terror-not the doings of demons nor the depredations of ghouls-can surpass the atrocities visited regularly by men upon their fellow-beings.”
May- The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Author: Ann Packer
Pages: 432
Three words: sad, provoking, unexpected
Quote: “What was it about fashion ... It was less about beauty than about transformation. Who would I be in a turquoise paisley slip dress and beaded sandals?”
June- Post Grad
Author: Caroline Kitchener
Pages: 320
Three words: honest, accurate, abrupt
Quote: “In his book Emerging Adulthood, Jeffrey Arnett, professor of psychology at Clark University, identifies “self-focus” as one of the characteristics that makes the period between adolescence and adulthood so unique.”
July- Eight Hundred Grapes
Author: Laura Dave
Pages: 288
Three words: inviting, fun, uncertain
Quote: “Synchronization: The coordination of events to operate in union… Not fate, my father would add. Don’t confuse it with fate. Fate suggests no agency. Synchronization is all about agency.”
August- The Island of Lost Maps
Author: Miles Harvey
Pages: 408
Three words: informative, historic, intriguing
Quote: “Perhaps this explains why our culture uses cartographic and geographic language to express notions of sin and virtue. We speak of a moral compass. We describe good people as following the straight and narrow. We say sinners lost their way, lost their bearings. And in our fables of maps and money, characters are constantly torn between sticking to the path of righteousness and wandering into the wilderness of the soul…”
September- Savannah Blues
Author: Mary Kay Andrews
Pages: 416
Three words: charming, believable, vengeful
Quote: “Tal had never seen me the way I really was. Maybe now I could see myself.”
October- Best Friends
Author: Martha Moody
Pages: 512
Three words: shocking, emotional, transportive
Quote: “You can gussy them up with all the pretty rationales you want, but most major life decisions are whims.”
November- The Lost City of Z
Author: David Grann
Pages: 352
Three words: informative, interpretive, dramatic
Quote: “Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilizations were capable of springing up independently of each other. As a result, while some anthropologists and historians today consider Fawcett enlightened for his era, others, like John Hemming, depict him as a “Nietzschean explorer” who spouted, “eugenic gibberish.” In truth, he was both. As much as Fawcett rebelled against Victorian mores- becoming a Buddhist who lived like an Indian warrior- he could never transcend them. He escaped virtually every kind of pathology in the jungle, but he could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race.”
December- Priestdaddy
Author: Patricia Lockwood
Pages: 352
Three words: real, unscripted, funny
Quote: “The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.”
2020 Books
August- Dirty Girls Social Club
Author: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Pages: 320
Three words: relevant, engaging, relatable
Quote: “Why can’t there be one single guy out there as committed as all of us?”