Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Books finished in September 2017

This list looks long, but most of the "books" were free Kindle books that were quite short, some of them read in half an hour or not much more. It did, however, help that my husband was gone for a week in September (so I could read one paper book in bed, but even then I didn't manage to finish it before leaving for Germany, so had to take it with us and finish it in an airport), and that for most of the 10 days of September that we were traveling, I didn't have consistent reasonable internet access, so read more than I do when I do have internet access! Also, time in airports and on airplanes (six of them in September...) contributed to available reading time.

(The above was written at the beginning of October, as was the bare list of books/authors below. I am now, over a month later, going to attempt to give extremely short comments on each one, to just get around to publishing this...)

Days on the Road, Sarah Raymond Herndon  As I recall, this was a pioneer trip and an actual diary, and I enjoyed it very much, even it was free.

The Measure of Katie Calloway, Serena Miller  Yet another very good book, with certain predictable events (who was going to show up where and why, and who was going to get married).

Ten Days in a Mad-House, Nellie Bly  Non-fiction, by a woman reporter in a time when it was rare for women to have "real" jobs. She got herself committed to an insane asylum for the sake of the story, and the scary thing is, that once she was committed, she reverted to acting 100% her normal self and telling the complete truth, but without it having been arranged for someone else to get her out 10 days later, she never would have gotten out.

Queen Victoria, Hourly History  This was the first "Hourly History" that I read, and have read quite a few in the last couple of months. Nowhere could I find an actual author's name. Most of them take me about half an hour to read, but give an interesting overview with tidbits I either never knew or didn't remember. (Contrast this book, on the life of someone who lived for over 80 years, to the book it took me MONTHS to get through, on the life of Lady Jane Grey, who lived only 17 years!) Some of these books could do with better proofreading, but I like having this "history-lite" library on my Kindle.

Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths, Mark Shepard  Another very short book, but at the very least, I should now remember how to spell GandHi, as I'm pretty sure I used to, as I see regularly, put the H after the G...

Eden Park, Charlotte Bingham   This was the one and only paperback book (as opposed to Kindle book) that I finished in the month of September. The description on the back was one of those that makes the reader think that a particular event is the main event, when it isn't at all, but as the book was better than the back cover, that was fine with me. I like books that follow different people's lives and then show how they intersect with each other.

Embers of Love, Tracie Peterson  Umm....trying to remember this one, but don't. And it's one of the first ones on my Kindle carousel at the moment, because Katie is reading it. I suspect that it's a Christian romance and basically harmless. And I feel kind of the same way about the use of the word "harmless" when describing a book as Emily Starr did. (Or was it even her Aunt Elizabeth who said that? Lucy Maud Montgomery, anyway.)

The Mayflower, Hourly History  Again, a good overview, and some facts that I'd either never learned or long since forgotten, despite having grown up in the U.S.-history-centric U.S. school system.

Ashley's Amish Adventures: An Outsider Living with the Amish, Ashley Emma  This is supposed to be an actual account, and may well be, but I found it a little unbelievable. The author was researching for writing an "Amish romance," and the Amish and Mennonite people with whom I've actually spoken about Amish romances have been generally quite disdainful about them, so it surprises me that this entire community was so happy to host the author (who was homeschooled) for her purposes.

Benny and the Bank Robber, Mary C. Findley  This was a book that started out really slow for me, and then I couldn't put it down, even when I got extremely annoyed with a twist that should NOT have happened, and yet was predictable, too. I'd guess it's written for about ages 10-12, not a difficult read, but not too terribly preachy.

Benjamin Franklin, Hourly History  No comments to add to the other "Hourly History" comments, except that I may have gotten less out of this having already read so much about Benjamin Franklin.

Andrew Jackson, Hourly History Unlike the previous Hourly History books I'd read, I previously knew very little about Andrew Jackson, so there was much more new information for me in this book, yet I was glad to only spend half an hour on the topic!

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