When Reuben learns his ex Beth is getting married, he plans an elaborate distraction with friends, until a phone call changes everything.

#Read2025
#LitsyAtoZ
#Pantone2025

“I kiss you and kiss you
With arms round my own
Ah how I shall miss you
When dear you have grown” -W. B. Yeats

Two favorites that celebrate motherhood! 💖

#Celebrate #JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“Life is too short to waste on reading a book you‘re not enjoying…you should give a book fifty pages. But if you‘re over the age of fifty, take your age and subtract it from a hundred. So, if you‘re seventy, give the book thirty pages. “

Entertaining vignettes of the lives of librarians, and bookstore owners/employees from across the US.

#Read2025 #LitsyAtoZ #Pantone2025

“God has a plan for each of us.”

Sweet Violet is the last of the litter to find a home - she tries the bakery, plant nursery, and grocery; but at last she finds her home at a pleasant little bookshop with Alice the owner 🐱 🤍 📚

#Kittens

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“The world is full of miracles. But none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else‘s belief in them.”

Unpopular opinion here - not my favorite Backman. Timelines were confusing, and unlike reviewers implied, I did not laugh or cry. I do, however, appreciate the portrayal of art and friendship as salvation for the messy lives into which we are often thrust when we are young.

#Read2025 #LitsyAtoZ #Pantone2025

This novel has so many themes in so many characters, but for Count Rostov the themes of loss and loneliness are significant. He is a prisoner in Russia at the Metropol Hotel- were he to exit through the door, he would be shot. He has lost so much but seeks to assuage his pain by making connections with other guests and employees of the hotel💔

#CheerTheLonely
#JulyJazz

Mr. Key composed a poem upon viewing the flag at Fort McHenry in 1814 that would become the Star Spangled Banner 🎶. This flag now inhabits a dark and mysterious alcove in the Smithsonian in DC approached with awe by those who tiptoe through…

#Flag

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

All the ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️! The choice of narrator was brilliant, and the first chapter will really grab you! Wonderful debut🩵 Highly recommend 💖

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#LitsyAtoZ
#Pantone2025

“…a tent represented adventures and possibilities, giving you the stars every single night. But a house stayed in one place, safe but always the same.”

MG novel of self-discovery and truth finding mixed with tween awkwardness and a last name that nobody wants. 3.7 🌟

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#LitsyAtoZ
#Pantone2025

@DieAReader @TheAromaofBooks @Texreader @Lauredhel @BarbaraBB

One week until we enter August 2025! I hope you‘re ready!!

Please join us in our August photo challenge🧡 Post a book, song, play, poem, quote, film etc that matches the daily prompt. Use the hashtag and tag us. Everyone is welcome to play🥳

Thanks to everyone who played in July🙏🏻

#CharacterCharm

@Eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Memoir by the late Whitney Houston‘s bodyguard during the late 1980s and mid-1990s. Sad 😢. He could protect her from everyone except herself.

#Read2025
#LitsyAtoZ
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

“Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.”
-Thomas Paine

#Patriots

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“I could never love anyone as I love my sisters.” —Little Women

#FamilyReunion

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Between pick and so-so. I expected a lot more. The premise of compulsive lying was attractive and the characters were unlikable. The climax had me confused though and I kept thinking I had missed something. 🤷‍♀️

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

@DieAReader @TheAromaofBooks @Lauredhel @BarbaraBB

Over my head I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine, behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. -James Wright

#Hammock
#JulyJazz

“You have to love…You have to feel. It‘s the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart…to be swallowed up. And when…you are broken, betrayed, left, hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree,listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.” -LOUISE ERDRICH, The Painted Drum

The above books I lovingly call my Library of Grace

The joy of playing outdoors in any season is depicted in this lush picture book 🌷🌳 🍁❄️

#PlayOutside

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

A deliciously beautiful picture book about Evelyn Glennie, a deaf woman, who became the first full-time solo percussionist in the world.

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

Memoir by debut author Katie Fugett, who was thrust into widowhood in her early 20s when her husband suffered limb loss from an Iraqi IED, followed by PTSD/painkiller addiction. Mix that with the author‘s abusive chaotic childhood and you get a serious struggle to survive both within and without marriage 💔

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

“What was it about the military that made us believe it was our duty to not only accept violence against our bodies but find pride in enduring it?”

#Bravery 💔

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

#Listen

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks 🌼

“Those memories press into me like rude, insistent fingers, as I try to push them away."

Chief Kate Burkholder is investigating a brutal double homicide in the Amish community of Painters Mill. She‘s tough as nails but understands families‘ pain, despite having grown up Amish and later leaving that religious life…

#Read2025
#SeriesLove
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

“Gratitude was a lost art, she felt. People accepted things, took them as their right, and had forgotten how to give proper thanks.”

#Gratitude
#JulyJazz
#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Series2025
#Pantone2025

“But every person has to learn to accept what has happened in the past. Without bitterness. Or there is no point in continuing with life.”

Hidden ice world meets light of day wider world! Setting: Greenland, in the future beyond…

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

“…but to be on my own again and free. The thought is a dangerous one, though, and I know that I mustn‘t let it grow too large.”

HF dual timeline - midWWII and postwar 1953. Louise tries to connect clues and memories based on a lost then rediscovered necklace, a department store-turned-Nazi venue for selling seized goods, and her friend Franny…

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

“Life is a thread, connecting us all in unexpected ways.”

After losing her mom, Emmalee, a single mom, becomes a friend of coworker Leona, who wanted to be a mom but couldn‘t, at the sewing factory 🧵. When Leona dies suddenly, Emmalee is determined to craft Leona‘s funeral dress 👗

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

“Nourish the tree that lives in you.”

Beautifully painted picture book🌳🩷🌼

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

The Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One — is our de facto national motto. It was a rallying cry of our founders as they built a single unified nation from a collection of states. It‘s a good reminder of where we need to go.
-Steve Blank

#EPluribusUnum

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

#Eagle 🦅 ❤️🇺🇸🤍🇺🇸💙 🦅

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

This novel follows the lives of three prominent figures during the French Revolution: Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre.

#BastilleDay (Fete Nationale de France)🇫🇷

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

#Picnic 🧺 🍷 🧀 🥚 🥧 🍓🍎🍗🧁 🧺

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.”

Searing, soul-baring verse from the author of Goodbye Vitamin 😔

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantene2025

“There was gray everywhere.”

WWII HF dual timeline with intriguing subplots. Love, betrayal, holocaust, mystery ….

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo
#Pantone2025

@DieAReader @TheAromaofBooks @Lauredhel @BarbaraBB

#Simplicity

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

#RedWhiteBlueCvr

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Photos taken by @geodynamical_nonfiction my daughter on July 4.

#Fireworks

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Finished the Alibis collection of Amazon original stories! These are so good 😊 👏🏻 Favorites were The Skydivers and Death Row

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo

“Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty.”

Dr. Walter E. Williams (1936 - 2020) rose from a childhood in the housing projects of Philadelphia, that he shared with his sister and mom, to international prominence as an author, economist, distinguished professor, and syndicated columnist.

#Liberty

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.”

#Forgiveness

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”

#Peaceful

#JulyJazz #Pantone2025

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks
@BarbaraBB @Lauredhel

“When our skin touches, our atoms touch, their shadows merging into a shadow galaxy.”

Chicago 1950. Rosalind Porter has spent the war years as a physicist for the Manhattan project. She misses her work but her sadness over the atomic bomb‘s devastation in Japan is overwhelming. Love triangle, espionage, secrets…

#Bookspinbingo
#Read2025
#Pantone2025

“…people who are willing to grow emit an attractive vibe…even if you are just starting on your journey, being comfortable with moving beyond old limits gives off a special energy that calls in other emotionally mature people…”

#MentalHealth

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Twins provide valuable research opportunities in the areas of biology, law, psychology, sociology, and environment.

#Indivisible

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

I participated in the 4th of July parade with American Heritage Girls and their color guard, with kids on decorated bikes, parents/grandparents, city council, fire department, and police officers. In the pouring rain we marched with rain gear, greeting those who stepped out on their porches to wave 🇺🇸
However the fireworks show has been cancelled due to rain☔️Also 2 pix of glorious clouds this week!

#5joysfriday @DebinHawaii

"There's nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

-Bill Clinton

#StarsAndStripes ❤️??????❤️

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Today I‘m grateful for a quiet peaceful life with no one telling me what to do, financial independence from a long working life, and living by myself with my own decisions 😌

🎶Stand By Me🎼 by Ben E. King

#Loyalty

#JulyJazz

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

“Most of us are mysteries unto ourselves, and part of our lifelong quest is an effort to understand our authentic selves and our purpose.”

A delightful afternoon read! It‘s 1931 and calling themselves the Queens of Crime, 5 mystery writers (including Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers) band together to test their prowess at solving a recent murder of a young nurse named May Daniels. HF 5🌟

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo

Easy read, and part of a series maybe? Setting is Nantucket at the Whitley Hotel, about the lives and relationships of the staff and their families.

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo

@DieAReader @TheAromaofBooks

“No matter how hard I try, I can't escape him and our secrets. I tell myself it's only one lie, but…”

Soft pick-dual timeline 1996/2021. I stayed interested to find out what happened in the end, but the writing was less than stellar.

#Read2025
#Bookspinbingo

@DieAReader @TheAromaofBooks