Once again, I received multiple emails from North Shore Reading Roundup readers, and I want to thank this community for giving me the confidence to know this column is being read and appreciated. The interest keeps coming, and as long as it does, we’ll keep giving this a go. It’s all of you who keep it interesting, and I’m so grateful whenever any of you reach out.
The first email I received last week didn’t have any recommendations, but it had something just as important. It offered encouragement, and without meaning to, it also gave me a push to get myself organized.
Anne Deneen sent a note to tell us, “I love this column!” She has started a file of the books you all have been recommending, using Libby through the Arrowhead Library System. Her hold list is full at the moment, but whenever a new slot opens, she adds one of the Reading Roundup picks and keeps building her list.
She listens to a lot of audiobooks in the summer, but “in the hunker down months” she’ll be tackling her TBR. It’s her way of settling in when the weather turns and the pace of life shifts, and I loved that she shared it.
I’ve been adding to my own TBR, but Deneen inspired me to get more organized. I spent some time putting together an Excel document with all the books that have been recommended, or not necessarily recommended but mentioned, in our column. I plan to tackle them in a more deliberate way with a special North Shore Reading Roundup TBR. It has already become a prized file, and I can’t wait to dig into it.
It’s a good thing I got the spreadsheet ready, because LJ sent an email with several recommendations I’ll need to add to the list.
LJ has been a voracious reader since the third grade, when their grandmother told them, “People can take a lot of things away from you, but what they can never take away is your love of reading.”
This stayed with LJ, who typically reads between forty and fifty books a year from all genres, though historical fiction is a favorite. They just finished a series called The Red River of the North by Lauraine Snelling, which follows the lives and trials of Swedish immigrants in the early 1800s. It’s the kind of series that pulls you in through its people, and LJ read it straight through.
“The first book fascinated me to the point I had to read the complete series,” they wrote.
They also finished two Shana Abe books, The Second Mrs. Astor and An American Beauty. I happen to have both paperbacks on my shelf and plan to move them to that famous and now tilting TBR pile. All three of us Deneen, LJ, and me- have a problem with a TBR stack that never seems to shrink.
Next in line for LJ is Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage by Hugh Brewster. They’ll keep us posted on how it goes, and I’m looking forward to hearing what they think. I finished my John Saul book, The Unwanted. It was a horror story and reminded me a lot of Stephen King, but I actually appreciated the ending. We’ll talk about Stephen King, whom I have a love-hate relationship with, eventually in this column.
The Unwanted is about a teenage girl who begins experiencing strange, violent visions after moving to a small town with her father after her mother dies. As the episodes intensify, she discovers she may be connected to a string of long-buried secrets involving the town’s past and the people who still live there.
It’s classic Saul with its eerie atmosphere, unsettling twists, and a slow build toward a payoff that actually lands.
It made me interested in reading more of John Saul’s work, even though I heard he has retired from writing and thinks of it as a “paycheck.” That rubs me the wrong way. I guess I always assumed writers love writing and find it hard not to write, as long as they have time and inspiration. There is something disappointing about hearing otherwise, especially when the stories still have the power to pull you in.
Anyway, on the other end of genres, I picked up The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife, which the Reading Farmer mentioned in their latest crop of recommendations. I ended up reading and listening to the audiobook, depending on whether I could use my hands and eyes to hold the book or needed to put it in my ears. What I mean is that I couldn’t put it down.
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife is about an elderly man who gets mistaken for a nursing home resident and ends up borrowing the man’s life for a while. What unfolds is both heartwarming and heart-wrenching, with enough humor to keep you going when the realities of life lean sad. Fred is someone who naturally looks on the bright side, and the people he meets change him in ways he never expected, and he changes them, too, in the best ways. The story is Australian, and the audiobook narrator’s accent added a little extra charm.
I know what will stay with me most from the story is how much kindness can shift the course of a life, sometimes quietly, sometimes all at once.
Now I’m onto another recommendation, sent by Barb Liukkonen, which landed in my hands in an unexpected way. Mom had been reading the latest column and looked up to say, “I just finished The Frozen River.” She had nabbed it at the library and, seeing there were a couple of weeks before it was due, I swiped it from her pile. So far, it’s great, and I can’t wait to tell you all more in the next column.
Thank you to both Anne and LJ for writing in this week!
North Shore readers! Send me your bookish thoughts, your favorites, what you’re reading now, and what you read when you were 10, hiding under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime. Don’t let this column feel Unwanted or living on a Borrowed Life or headed towards a Fatal Voyage. Write to sarahwritesnsj@yahoo.com to keep our readers reading what you’re reading and it will be an American Beauty.
