Okay, didn't I JUST have a post about how I couldn't believe that June was over?? And now it's almost August?! ACK

Unbelievable but true, we only have a week left of July!! So if you're planning to Spin in August, it's time to start thinking about your lists. Hopefully everyone is well and not TOO stressed about the fact that we're officially into the SECOND HALF of 2024!!😮

As always, looking forward to seeing what everyone is hoping to read!!

This book was honestly just peculiar. I enjoyed it - mostly - but some parts of it just left me scratching my head a bit. I really enjoyed the parts on the island and reading about him creating a life there. But then it felt like the ending went a bit off the rails, and then it was almost like he was like, “you know what, never mind, I'll just write a second volume“ and that's the end! 😂 Still, as a book widely acclaimed as “the first novel“ ⬇

I picked up this charming book because somewhere along the line I read that P.G. Wodehouse loved it. This is a gentle story about a newly married couple and their first year of marriage. If, like myself, you are worried that things won't go well for them - fear not! They're absolutely adorable together and continue to be so all the way through. While Mackail pokes a little fun at their naivety, on the whole, all the adjectives I came up for this⬇

I'm always down for a reread of one of my heart-books, so I was happy when this came up as a #HashtagBrigade read. I know its old-fashioned sensibilities aren't for everyone, but I think many of Alcott's lessons on love, patience, kindness, and selflessness are timeless. This one has been hugely influential for me throughout my life, so while I understand some of the criticisms of it... I don't accept them 😂

I'm not sure how old this particular⬇

Scrawled on the front page of this book is the statement that “This is the first Nancy Drew book I ever read“ probably written circa 1991 😂 I can see why this one got me hooked - there's loads of action and the treasure-hunting aspect was great fun. As an adult reread I was a little confused by the attitudes and actions of some of the characters, but overall I just let it ride with these LOL

Thanks as always for hosting @Librarybelle !!

This isn't my favorite of Kjelgaard's book, but it's still an enjoyable read. 12-year-old Bud is “farmed out“ from the orphanage to an older couple on a farm. But it turns out that they're just lonely now that all their kids have moved on and while they do need help around the farm, they're mostly just wanting to help a kid who needs it. Bud is wary at first, but gradually comes to love the couple and their home. His first week there, he comes ⬇

Like Emerson, I was a bit tired of hearing about the MASTER CRIMINAL but honestly these books are just such good fun that even the MC drama stayed pretty entertaining, even if the ending feels rather ridiculous. Ramses is still spoiled, but incrementally less obnoxious in this one. Overall I'm enjoying my reread of this series, but looking forward to the later books where Ramses is older and more a part of the team.

This installment of the Scarlet Pimpernel series is more of the same haha I really enjoy these books and it has been fun reading them in chronological order. This is one I hadn't read in the past. One of the band marries a French immigrant, but her father kidnaps her, claiming that the marriage isn't real because it happened in England (??) and he wants her to marry a rich counter-revolutionist who is willing to donate a pile of money to the ⬇

August's #RandomClassic is Fahrenheit 451. I've never read this one and honestly know very little about it, so I am going in almost completely blind. The book is divided into three parts, so rather than following a chapter a day, we'll be reading one part per week. Since the 1st is on a Thursday, I'll try to post discussion posts on August 8, 15, and 22.

As usual, I'm tagging my master list for this group. Please let me know if you'd ⬇

(thru ch 14) Well, ol' Robby has really been through it! Over 20 years!!!! I had no idea this book covered so much time. I'm still enjoying this one although he does get quite long-winded sometimes with his philosophizing, and the writing can be repetitive as he tells you what's going to happen and then tells what happened lol Obviously his desire to “get a servant“ instead of “get a companion“ is troublesome. But I thought his conclusions about ⬇

I was quite glad to be able to get a copy of this book from the library, but I literally think I am going to order my own copy after all because some JERK has random underlined not passages, not phrases, not even WORDS but literally random letters!?!? I think they were trying to mark works “subtly“ since, you know, it's a LIBRARY BOOK but it is SO distracting. Every page is like this, with at least 2, sometimes up to 10, words marked. 😑 ⬇

(thru ch7) I'm actually really enjoying this one, even if our narrator is somewhat repetitive. I had no idea so many adventures happened to him before he even got shipwrecked!! It kind of fascinated me that he was a slave for a couple of years himself, but seemed to think nothing of heading to Africa to get some slaves of his own. Crazy.

So many random things that he just says casually and then moves on. “I had two elder brothers, one of which ⬇

I've read and enjoyed many of Nesbit's children's books, but didn't realize that she had also written a handful of “adult“ novels (in the sense that the main characters aren't children). Like her books for younger readers, this one was full of fun and humor, with likable characters and some silly scrapes. My biggest issue was that the ending felt really abrupt. I definitely needed to know more about the futures of all these characters, and ⬇

I enjoyed this little “return to the hometown“ romance to start with, but was skimming by the end. The male MC has worked for literal years to gain the work position he just got because it will allow him to live close to his mom and siblings. Female MC waltzes back into town and ends up with a job as his subordinate. I lost all respect for her when she got super pissy because he wouldn't sleep with her because of the company's rules, despite her ⬇

Apparently this book bored me so much that I spaced on posting the final discussion post for #RandomClassics 😂This was a borderline pan for me. I did enjoy a couple of the chapters more than others, but overall this book just absolutely dragged for me. Partially, I felt like I needed more background on Britain's older history - I'm fuzzy on when the Romans showed up and what they did, so I got somewhat lost at times. I also just couldn't figure⬇

I feel like I need to start videoing myself drawing the numbers for this board to prove that I'm not cheating 😂 BookSpin and DoubleSpin in the same column, along with two free spaces!??!!? DoubleSpin in the row with three more free spaces?! Good luck out there this month, friends - the BookSpin Fates are smiling upon us!! 😂

Can't wait to see everyone's boards!!!

My standard monthly text/explanations below ⬇

Good morning, everyone! The moment you have all been waiting for!! Our official #BookSpin number is NINETEEN! Our official #DoubleSpin number is ONE!! I have thoroughly enjoyed looking at everyone‘s lists & am really looking forward to seeing your reviews!!

My next post will be the #BookSpinBingo card. I am NOT tagging anyone on that post!! If you want to bingo, please just check my profile for the card. This saves me having to double tag ⬇

Another win because I just love these books so hard that it doesn't even matter how good they objectively are 😂 I was so excited to see Trixie's brothers come back from camp and see the club starting to form. This one always stuck out for me because of the whole forgery aspect. Back when I first read this, we had carbon paper around the house and I, also, practiced becoming a forger 😂

So #BobWhiteBuddies - how did you feel about this one? ⬇

This sequel to The Rise and Fall of DODO was a bit of a disappointment. The story lacked cohesion and I had so many questions about why we were doing some things and not doing other things, mostly why can we save the life of one person via time travel but not the other?? The complete focus on one of the team members vs the absolutely whatever attitude towards the other really turned me off. A lot of this just felt kind of pointless. ⬇

This is brilliant bad cover work here - originally published/set in 1932, the main character of this story would probably literally rather die than show her bare midriff/legs in public😂 Love these 80s covers that try to make GLH look spicier.

This is typical GHL work - sweet, hardworking, poor girl receives help from a kind, goodhearted fellow and everyone ends up rich and happy in the end, with a dose of Jesus throughout. Not for everyone, ⬇

This was a cute but not amazing easy chapter book about a very spoiled princess who adopts a pig for her birthday - except the pig comes with a pig boy who isn't very impressed by the princess's princessiness haha The drawings were the best part. Soft pick. (i.e. 3.5* It was okay 😂)

#Roll100 @PuddleJumper
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This was a book I wanted to like more than I did. Part of the problem is that the whole point is that Olivia runs a business where she matches people based on their Chinese Zodiac signs and making sure that her clients are paired with compatible signs. We are told the reasons for why she's so absolutely die hard about this, but despite the fact that we spend the whole book in Liv's head, I just never could quite figure out her obsession with ⬇

Jolie has a severe underbite that has impacted her health and looks her entire life. She's going to have surgery in a few weeks and even though the chances of her dying under anesthetic are very tiny - there is still a chance! So she decides to complete a list of things she would have wished she'd done if she ends up dead haha It's a fun premise and Jolie is a likable characters. I loved her warm family, and I always appreciate the way Winfrey ⬇

Thanks so much for having a spontaneous #Two4Tuesday #TuesdayGiveaway @TheSpineView !!!

I'd be tickled to receive any of the books my to-read list, but lately I've kind of been in a thriller mood, so I'd love to read the tagged book soon!!

Okay. I don't want to say this, but I have to: 2024 is less than a week away from being HALF OVER! 😲 I feel like my #BookSpin reminder post each month is actually turning into a mini existential crisis concerning the passage of time 😂 But here we are!!! July starts on MONDAY!!!!

If, like myself, you take refuge from the way we're hurtling through the rapids of life by reading, it's probably time to start thinking about your July list!! ⬇

I need to just go ahead and finish this book because I feel like I've been reading it forever 😂 I did find “Hal o' the Draft“ SLIGHTLY less boring than all the Roman “we're sitting about on a wall while other people fight battles other places“ bits haha But this book is nooooot for me and like @TheBookHippie I will NOT be picking up Puck #2!!!

Only two chapters left!!!!

@BarkingMadRead @julieclair @TheBookHippie

This was quite the ride. Like most of Steinbeck's writing, I don't really love it, but I respect it. Parts of it were brilliant, insightful, cutting, thoughtful, and will stick with me for a long time. Parts of it felt unnecessarily gruesome, dramatic, and over-the-top. Some of it just felt like filler.

Part of my issue with this book was that I was way more interested in the Hamiltons, but they weren't actually the point of the story. ⬇

Okay friends, here is the schedule for Robinson Crusoe!! Basically, I will try to check in about 1/3 and then 2/3 through the book, i.e. chapters 7 and 14. I've included the final sentence of each of those chapters for those whose books are not divided into 20 chapters. We'll do our best to keep on track together/avoid spoilers, but I realize no promises can be made when we're all reading different editions with different divisions!! ⬇

Oh my word, we are already more than halfway through June!! So it's time to see who would like to read along for July's #RandomClassic - Robinson Crusoe!! I've been wanting to reread this one for years.

In a trick move, I have two editions of this book. They seem to be the same text, but one is divided into 20 chapters, and the other isn't! So if you are planning to read along, let me know whether or not your book has chapters and we will see ⬇

(thru ch 49) Honestly, I've been totally hooked on this book during the last week or two. What is going to happen with the twins?? Is Cal going to give into the darkness within himself? Is Aron going to break? Is Kate going to destroy their lives somehow?

It's also been kind of interesting to read a book set during WWI; I feel like most books are set during WWII. The story about everyone making the life of the man with the (German??) accent ⬇

Hmmm. More history. It's not... terrible?? But it's not very exciting and it's not what I expected haha I'm pretty much dragging my way through this one. Are any of you enjoying it more than me? Any thoughts? I'm mostly being reminded of how little I know about “ancient“ British history 😂

#RandomClassics @BarkingMadRead @julieclair @TheBookHippie

I have roughly five million thriller/mysteries on my TBR, so if none of these click, it's not hard to find some more options 😂 But here are a few that I keep meaning to get to - I've enjoyed other books by each of these authors. Let me know what you think @Jerdencon @robinb @bookandbedandtea

A day late, but here is my #WednesdayWanderings post!! My husband and I love to hike and most of our vacations center around doing so, although we are day hikers, not backpackers haha We visited the Lake Placid region back in 2016 and climbed Algonquin Peak. It's not a terribly long hike, but these are photos of the TRAIL - so much of it was just scrambling up rocks! Which meant coming down was just as hard as going up. I would like to say that ⬇

Okay, is it me or is this book BORING?? 😂 I mean, it's okay, I guess, but I have definitely been more plowing my way through than particularly looking forward to picking this book up. Would it be more interesting if I was more familiar with British history?? Let me know if any of you are enjoying this more than me haha

#RandomClassic @BarkingMadRead @CatLass007 @julieclair @TheBookHippie

The first half of this book was a pick. The second half really fell off and felt like Wiggin couldn't really decide where she wanted to take the story so it didn't go much of anywhere. However, I was glad to finally read this classic and enjoyed discussing its influence on Anne of Green Gables with the #KindredSpirits Is it plagiarism if you write it a million times better than the original? 😂

@TheBookHippie @BarbaraJean

Originally published in 1953, I've had this library edition for years and years. A middle grade read with delightful illustrations by Lisl Weil, it's a story about twins getting ready to celebrate their 10th birthday and also getting ready for a hobby show at school. It's a simple little story but super cute.

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This rating is definitely an “it's me not you“ kind of thing. I actually loved the concept of this book - a woman doesn't know anything about her birth mother, who died when she was young. Now that her father has passed away and her stepmother has dementia, she is going through their things and comes across a photo of her mother and a few other people. She posts on a forum, wondering if anyone can help identify the others. This leads to a ⬇

While I am always delighted to visited Amelia and Emerson, this isn't my favorite of the series. Their son Ramses is, frankly, obnoxious. The mystery is a little shaky. And every ten pages we have to listen to Emerson expounding on why he's more intelligent than anyone who has ever believed in any religion. But outside of those annoyances, there is still so much to enjoy. The setting, the non-Ramses characters (in fairness, Ramses matures and ⬇

A gloomy day here, so I think it's a perfect day for reading!!! Our BookSpin number conveniently got slotted into a line with TWO free spaces!! 🎉 Also, when I was making this post, I realized that the BookSpinBingo “book title“ has over 2000 posts! I just want to thank all of you again for participating in this challenge and reading with me. It's SO fun to see how all of you make this work for you. I love it!!!

My standard monthly text below ⬇

Good morning, everyone! The moment you have all been waiting for!! Our official #BookSpin number is SEVENTEEN! Our official #DoubleSpin number is SIX!! I have thoroughly enjoyed looking at everyone‘s lists & am really looking forward to seeing your reviews!!

My next post will be the #BookSpinBingo card. I am NOT tagging anyone on that post!! If you want to bingo, please just check my profile for the card. This saves me having to double tag ⬇

Okay #RandomClassics friends, here is the schedule for Puck of Pook's Hill!! It seems that this is a collection of short stories and poems. So the main title for each bullet point is the story, and the parenthetical titles are the associated poems. Each story is about 25-30pgs, so 2-3 a week feels doable. We'll see how it goes!!!

@BarkingMadRead @CatLass007 @julieclair @TheBookHippie

Another soft pick. This one starts strong with 12-year-old Naomi discovering that her dad is actually a serial killer and rescuing his latest victim. It's super creepy. Adult Namoi has changed her last name and tried to put her past behind her. She's a successful and somehow stupidly rich photographer and purchases a very rundown but beautiful old house in Washington state. That's where this book got muddled. I actually didn't mind the ⬇

It's no secret that I'm a lifelong lover of horse stories of all kinds. I've read one or two other books by Lyons, so I was interested to read this one. However, it just didn't work for me. Jill breaks off her engagement with Hadley because he's a jerk, but then decides that actually she is going to show him that he was wrong about what he said, and of course he'll admit that, and then he won't be a jerk, so it will all work out. Except that's ⬇

Since I actually finished this 700pg book, you would think that I would have strong feelings about it. But I weirdly don't. There's a lot here that I enjoyed. It's a time-travel book, which isn't always my thing, but it's handled here in a way that actually did (mostly) make sense to me. I actually enjoyed the format, which is a mixture of journal entries from various characters, plus other documents, notes, transcripts, etc.

This book was ⬇

YAY!! Another fabulous outing with Trixie and Honey!!! This one definitely feels like Part 2 of the first book. While I 100% enjoyed this, some of it felt genuinely ridiculous, but in that fun, campy way that I love. And as a kid I still felt like these were adventures that could happen to me. So many characters running around in the woods in this book!! 😂 I honestly loved how the girls were terrible at directions and didn't always make the ⬇

I LOVE Genevieve Foster's “parallel history“ books. I remember reading these in middle school and realizing for the first time that even though America History and World History were two separate courses in school, the history itself all happened at the same time, and what was going on in France, China, Australia, etc impacted and influenced what was happening here and vice versa. It was fun to revisit this one. And her illustrations are adorable.

This series has really grown on me. I love Eve and Roark together. They balance each other so well. Eve is a fantastic MC and all the support characters are also so well-drawn. Reading this right after finishing the Amelia Peabody book had me wondering if Robb was giving Elizabeth Peter's heroine a nod by naming Eve's sidekick Peabody 😂

#SeriesLove2024 @TheSpineView @Andrew65
#192025 - 1997 @Librarybelle
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