Miranda’s Comments (group member since Sep 23, 2011)

Miranda’s comments from the Topeka & Shawnee Co. Public Library group.

Thanks for sharing this list, Deb! Holly, I hope you'll let us know if you like any of the selections that you read. :)

I recently finished Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I loved it! I followed it up with The Passage, by Justin Cronin, which Mandel referenced in her book. Then I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird for discussion and in preparation for Go Set a Watchman. I'm now reading Incorrigible Children #5, by Maryrose Wood, and have Judy Blume's new book for adults waiting for me! A great month of reading, to be sure. :)

Thanks for sharing! :)

Mattie's determination and individuality are really admirable! I love the narrative voice of this book, and really got sucked into the story. I'm sure it will ne a re-read. :)

Melanie, Caramelo is one of my next reads, as we'll be discussing it in next weeks TALK book discussion! I hope that you get into it and end up enjoying it. :)

I just finished The Haunting of Hill House, by
Shirley Jackson. Amazing book. Subtle, creepy, and really pulled me into the madness of the narrator's experience.

Now I'm getting into The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill..strong start. :)

I just finished The Black Country, by Alex Grecian. It's the second book in the Scotland Yard Murder Squad series. I'm not normally a fan of mysteries, but I read the first one, The Yard in two days, and then had to follow right up with this one. Fast-paced, grounded in history, and kept me reading into the night despite the shudders!

I just finished Silver Linings Playbook for the Bean There, Read That discussion group. It sucked me right in, and I didn't want to put it down. I started watching the movie and didn't like it much, unfortunately. The book set us up with a bit of a mystery, whereas the movie gave too much away in the first 15 minutes. Has anyone else read this one, watched the movie, or both? What did you think?

I just found out yesterday that there is a second title in the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series! Must read, for sure.

Melanie wrote: "Miranda wrote: "I'm reading The Art of Racing in the Rain for our December Bean There, Read That selection. The book is narrated by a dog, and I can already tell that it's going to ..."

I wrote down at least a dozen quotes that I thought were very inspiring. It's definitely a book that speaks on many levels, and I think it's one that I would like to reread, too. :)

Deb wrote: "Miranda wrote: "I'm reading The Art of Racing in the Rain for our December Bean There, Read That selection. The book is narrated by a dog, and I can already tell that it's going to ..."

Now that I've finished the book I can agree with you, Deb! I really enjoyed it. Parts of it were hard to read, because of the pain Denny and Zoe went through, but I loved the ending!

Turtle Moon is a lovely title, I'll have to look for that one. I really enjoyed the movie Practical Magic, but did not know until recently that it was based on a book. I definitely want to read it!

I'm reading The Art of Racing in the Rain for our December Bean There, Read That selection. The book is narrated by a dog, and I can already tell that it's going to be a bit heartbreaking. Anyone else read this one?

Cheryll wrote: "Miranda wrote: "I just finished The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman. It is a collection of short stories that fit together to tell the tale of a small town in Massachusetts from its founding through t..."

Let me know what you think!

The Red Garden is a collection of short stories that fit together to tell the tale of a small town in Massachusetts from its founding through the present day.
Blackwell is not your ordinary small town; here, magic and nature form a fantastic backdrop for powerful human stories. In the shadow of Hightop Mountain, great black bears roam the woods. Eel River, cold and muddy, swarms with the black eels that feed many in the town and provide the source for the town's leatherworking industry. Red hair and mercurial natures are common, and shapeshifting, ghosts, murder, betrayal are woven into the town's history. Johnny Appleseed himself planted the original apple tree that bears the delicious "Look-no-further" apple, and Emily Dickinson spends a night replanting a garden in scarlet blooms so that a blind man might see "the flash of scarlet, the trail of blood, the inside story of who she was."
This is my first dip into Alice Hoffman's work, and I am definitely hooked! Her work is vividly descriptive and beautifully poetic. More than that, I finished this book and felt reawakened to the limits of mortality and the importance of keeping focused on what really matters. Life is short, but each person's impact can ripple on through generations.

I just finished The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman. It is a collection of short stories that fit together to tell the tale of a small town in Massachusetts from its founding through the present day. Blackwell is not your ordinary small town; here, magic and nature form a fantastic backdrop for powerful human stories. In the shadow of Hightop Mountain, great black bears roam the woods. Eel River, cold and muddy, swarms with the black eels that feed many in the town and provide the source for the town's leatherworking industry. Red hair and mercurial natures are common, and shapeshifting, ghosts, murder, betrayal are woven into the town's history.
This is my first dip into Alice Hoffman's work, and I am definitely hooked! Her work is vividly descriptive and beautifully poetic. More than that, I finished this book and felt reawakened to the limits of mortality and the importance of keeping focused on what really matters. Life is short, but each person's impact can ripple on through generations.
Is anyone else here a Hoffman fan? She's published a lot of titles. What should I pick up next?

Timothy wrote: "I just finished Cloud Atlas, and it has become one of my favorite books. It is a really inspiring work, even just from a structural point of view. I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind doing ..."

This is one that I definitely want to read!

I thought that The Book Thief was just beautiful and painful, and unforgettable. I really liked the unique POV of our narrator, and the author is so poetic. I kept track of the many examples of gorgeous metaphor and poetic prose as I read, because they were so striking. Highly recommend it!

I just read this with Sky and David a couple of months ago, and I also read it as a middle schooler. It is a great book, but as Cheryll mentioned there are some really wrenching scenes of cruelty that you'll never forget. There's also a bit of racism. It provided a good opportunity to discuss those issues with my son, and the writing style and vocabulary are also a nice challenge for younger readers. Hope you enjoy it!

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin takes us to a planet where every citizen is both male and female, and the drive of sexual needs is limited to brief phases. It is a world known to outsiders as Winter, because the climate is brutally cold and the terrain is harsh.
An emissary to the planet hopes to establish communication and interaction with this world that is so different from any other familiar to the Known Worlds. The narrator remarks that the culture shock was much less than the "biological shock [he] suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters."
It's a story about trust, and an unlikely friendship. It opens up questions in a reader's mind and doesn't answer them.
I knew before I had even finished this novel that I would want to read it again!

I am finishing up Margaret Atwood's newest novel, Maddaddam. It's the final in a trilogy of dystopian novels that tackle gene splicing, overpopulation, corporate domination, class division, erosion of liberties, and more. The characters are well-developed and the story feels so very possible. Atwood has a flair for vivid prose and authentic dialogue, too, so I've enjoyed reading this series tremendously. I'm putting the last few pages off until tomorrow, and I'm preparing for series letdown, because this is the last! It's definitely a series that I'll read again.