My cousin recommended Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, to me. It wasn’t an enthusiastic recommendation. It had been recommended to her, and she hadn’t really been into it, but she thought I might enjoy it.
I’m often hesitant to take on a book that is a solid two inches thick, especially on a recommendation that starts with, “I didn’t really like it, but…”
As it turns out, I did enjoy it.
I love big, coffee table-sized books that are full of luscious illustrations. If a book has interesting and well-written text to go along with those illustrations, so much the better.
Enter Trees: A Rooted History, by Piotr Socha and Wojceich Grajkowski.
The Chaplain and I talk about hibernation frequently at this time of year. We feel sluggish. All we want to do is sit on the sofa and eat carbs. The Chaplain can’t do that, because the Christmas season demands even more work from him than usual between his church responsibilities and work commitments.
I can slow down during the winter season, and I do, because my body won’t let me do anything else. I struggle with it every year. Surrender and Acceptance are all very well and good, except when Christmas is coming and you are the Magic Maker.
I recently read The Queen of Nothing, by Holly Black, and Imposters, by Scott Westerfeld. I wanted to throw them together into one post because while they are fairly different from each other, they are from the same genre, and both books feature twin sisters as the main characters.
At the end of August this past summer, we quit Amazon Prime and Netflix. A number of factors were at play, but the main thing is that our memberships with those two companies weren’t in keeping with our family values, so we said goodbye.
Now, my kids have rediscovered PBS and are totally into The Great British Baking Show and Wild Kratz. And on the occasion that we order from Amazon, things take a lot longer to get here.
