More from my Reader's Digest Collection

 This time I am sharing an old book but one I thought was definitely worth my time. If it might be something you would like to read to I have links to this book found on Amazon. My own copy will be passed on to a thrift store in town for someone else to enjoy.

All four stories found in Volume 2 from 1987 kept me turning pages and ignoring the television and that's a good thing. 

• A Place to Hide by Evelyn Anthony first published in 1987 and takes place mostly Ireland. It is a story of a brother and sister caught up in the struggles between Catholic, Protestant and the governments of England and Ireland.
• Nightshade by Gloria Murphy was published in 1986. This tale is a thriller with lots of great plot twists. It includes characters like a good cop, a single mom, an unknown brother who stalks a family. It does end with happily ever after for the single mom but that is all you're getting from me.
• East and West by Gerald Green was in bookstores first in 1986. Set in the years of WWII it puts two people in love and their families in the middle of the the fears and dangers of being at war and living in countries that were both attacked.
• Will Bryant wrote A Time For Heroes that was also available in 1987. Set in 1923 frontier Arizona this book was just so fun to read. Serious thing happened here but the characters were all a bit over the top. There was a flying ace that gets the girl. I loved the grumpy old grandpa who was a prospector and hopeful inventor. Add in assorted crooks and thieves and a newpaper man who wants a story and you get a story full of life and unexpected heroes. 

Reader's Digest Condensed Books

Volume 2 1987

The links to this book on Amazon are Affiliate links. Clicking and then purchasing from Amazon might earn me a small commission with no cost to you but you get my thanks and I might buy more yarn. We will both be happy, right?

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

A Quiet Sunday

It was a lovely Sunday here. Here is currently Arizona. The temperatures are down in the 70's and I had all the windows open to enjoy it. We selfishly have a patch of grass in the backyard and looking out at the bright green was so easy on the eyes.

The last two Sundays I haven't turned on the laptop. Email goes unchecked. Books are read throughout the day and something on Netflix is watched in the evening. So here I am rested, refreshed and recharged and in front of a screen again on a beautiful Monday morning, well more like afternoon now that I look at the time, to share this post with you. After this I will use Tweetdeck to see who has retweeted any of my posts and get busy returning the favor with retweets from their timelines.

What I finished reading was Reader Digest, Volume 4, 2002, Today's Best Nonfiction. This volume contained 5 books and I could not find this particular volume on Amazon so at the end I will give you affiliate links to all the titles separately. These links don't cost you anything however if you click and then make a purchase a tiny bit is paid to me and after all a girl always needs a bit of pocket money right? If you choose to click and then shop, many thanks!

The books in this volume are

1. Last Man Down by Daniel Paisner
2. Find Me by Rosie O'Donnell
3. The Count and the Confession by John Taylor
4. American Pie (slices of life and pie from America's back roads) by Pascale Le Draoulec
5. Zoya's Story by Zoya with John Follain and Rita Cristofari

All of these books were great reads!

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

The Art Forger

I recently finished reading The Art Forger by B. A.  Shapiro. This was a book I was able to read free through Amazon Prime books. You can have up to 10 titles at a time downloaded and I always do, stored on your Kindle app or I suppose on a Kindle device which I don't have. Now I can return this book and get another just like using a library. Prime reading has about 1500 titles so I will be sure to find something new.

From the book's page on Amazon.

Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece—the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years—may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing—and not seeing—the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.

I enjoyed reading about the technical details of painting, forgery and determining authenticity of art works. The plot was interesting, paced well and kept the digital pages turning. The character of Claire Roth was a mystery to me. How and why she made some of her choices were beyond my way of thinking but I like to read books with characters very different from me. After all reading about someone just like me would be boring, been there, done that, kind of boring.


Amazon has several versions of The Art Forger to fit your reading preferences, Audible, Kindle, paperback, hardcover and and audio CD.

Affiliate links for shopping below and in the text above if you would like to read this book yourself.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Did you ever pick up and read a book that made you wonder why you didn't discover it much sooner? The Bridge of Sighs has a copyright of 2007. That was a time when I was going to the library very often and trying to keep up with current bestsellers and I missed reading this one. On the back cover of my copy is a review from The Washington Post Book World and it says exactly what I felt while getting lost in the depths of this novel.

"A story of constantly evolving complexity and depth....[Bridge of Sighs is] Russo's most intricate, multifaceted novel....Enormous and enormously moving."

If you are in the mood to read a great American story the ad below will take you right to it. You could also check libraries. I actually got my copy at a thrift store here in town and now that I finished it my copy will go back there for them to sell it again.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Amazon Prime Reading

In our house we have an Amazon Prime subscription and enjoy the benefits. My husband has become a shopper and packages show up often for things like his favorite Trader Joe's mints and coffee since we don't have a store in Jackson. He has also found boat parts and other hard to find locally items.

I, on the other hand, am not a big shopper. I feel like I am coming to the time in my life where it makes sense to move toward living more minimally. However I do enjoy a couple of Prime benefits, namely Prime Video and Prime Reading.

With Prime Reading you can have 10 books at a time out on your account. When you finish one you return it and get another. With about 1300 books available for Prime Reading I have plenty to choose from and I am sure the selections change over time so I am not afraid of running out of enjoyable reading. Being able to have 10 at a time means I can download onto my tablet and have vacation reading on that slim device and not have to pack heavier books. Having 10 at a time means also that if I download one that I really don't like, which for me is very rare but happens, I am not left with nothing to read. I love this!

The last two that I read and returned are The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Physician by Noah Gordan. The former was okay but I admit to just skimming parts of it when I felt the author went too deep into the most minor details of his thoughts. As for whether you believe in God or not I leave that up to you. The Physician was a wonderful book. It was historical fiction about a boy driven by a desire to be a doctor that takes him from being an orphan in England to studying in the Middle East and back again during the Middle Ages. I don't want to put spoilers for books in my posts. Let's just say this one was a great read!

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

The ads below are affiliate links. Clicking on them to shop on Amazon will not cost you anything but could add a few pennies to my yarn fund. Thanks in advance for clicking and shopping!

Another Book Post

Three days in a row of blog posts and exercise. I didn't get these things down during Labor Day Weekend but am on a roll this week. I have a lot of changes and travel coming up in my life between now and the first part of 2019 so I expect there will be more interruptions. Despite these happenings I have every intention to keep up the habit and established routines of walking and blogging whenever possible.

My daily steps and stairs are done and I am drinking a tall glass of water while cooling down and writing. In the background I am listening to a Fresh Air Podcast that is an interview of John Kerry.

I have a backlog of books I have read and not recorded here. Today's post will chip away at that list by one book. The book I am talking about today is a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, Volume 1 from 1992. If by some strange chance you are interested in reading any or all the stories in this volume I found that a few sellers have a copy to sell on EBay. Please note that I am an EBay affiliate so I would get a few pennies of yarn money if you make a purchase.

So here are the copies available as of today (9/6/2018). No guarantees that they will still be there when you click.

• lancemcc0719 has a copy for $4.77
• stuff4you22 is selling a copy that has a dust jacket for $9.85
• bawoods2011 copy info says very good condition for $6.00
• grandmashouse347 has the least expensive copy at $1.55 for a book said to be in good condition

The stories in the volume were all good and I enjoyed them all. Included in this volume is Night Over Water by Ken Follett, Doctor on Trial by Henry Denker, Beast by Peter Benchley and Dear Family by Camilla Bittle.

My favorite of the four included works of fiction in this volume was Dear Family. It is a story of a family struggling and even triumphing through the years of the Great Depression. Beast was the book I liked least in this group. I found the idea of an evil, thinking octopus a bit far fetched but your appreciation of this book by the author of Jaws my vary from mine. The other two books included in this volume were certainly worth my reading time. I have read a few of Ken Follett's books and enjoyed them all.

Time to get on with my day.
Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Next Finished Book of Books

Another volume read and ready to be passed on to a thrift shop. 

Most of the stories in this volume from 2001 aren't ones I would normally seek out to buy or borrow from a library. I don't regret the time reading them however because I feel no time with a book is ever wasted and I felt like each one expanded my knowledge of the world in some way.

• In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton
• Keep It Simple Stupid by Judge Judy Sheindlin
• The Russian Word For Snow by Janis Cooke Newman
• Special Agent by Candice DeLong
• Down The Highway by Howard Sounes

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Time Life Book Digest 1990

I finished another book last night. This is another volume of best sellers at the time by Time Life rather than Reader's Digest this time. Loved all these stories and maybe you will too.

• The Longest Tunnel by Alan Burgess- Many of you may know of this story through the movie "the Great Escape" but it is worth checking out this book too. 
• Bitter Sweet by LaVyrle Spencer- A story of parting after high school and coming back together later in life. Of course there is more to it than that but wouldn't want to spoil it for you.
• The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille- A fascinating look into east coast wealth, lawyers and the mafia.
• The Burden of Proof by Scott Turow- Chasing family secrets after the death of his wife in a search to understand drives this great story.

The links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you chose to click and make a purchase I get a few pennies at no cost to you.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Reader's Digest Volume 5 2002 Nonfiction

As the title says I finished another book. This time it is a Today's Best Nonfiction edition from 2002. This book had the condensed versions of 5 very different and interesting stories.

• 3000 Degrees by Sean Flynn
• Cancer Schmancer by Fran Drescher
• A Dog Year by John Katz
• Riding the Bus With My Sister by Rachel Simon
• The Children on Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen

All of these books were interesting but the one that I stayed up a bit longer to read a bit more each night was The Children of Willesden Lane. The main character is Lisa Jura who, with many other children, was sent to England from occupied Europe during WWII to save their lives. War and survival, hard family choices, coming of age, a career as a pianist, reunification, and more all in this story. If you like history from this time period you will want to find a copy of this book.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Another Reader's Digest Condensed Book

Just finished another of my gifted books. As I finish these I have been considering what to do with them. One thought is to pass them on to a thrift store. Another idea I have been considering is to offer them for a bit more that postage and packaging on Ebay. I would be an absolute beginner on Ebay but it might be fun. Any thoughts or tips from more experienced Ebay sellers?

This volume has 5 stories in it and they are all nonfiction.

• Public Enemies by John Walsh. This book covered a few of the cases shown in the TV show America's Most Wanted. The behind the scenes look at the crew that makes that show happen was interesting.
• Diana's Boys by Christopher Andersen. I have no way to know how true any of this book is. The author describes the lives of Diana's boys, William and Harry, and how they were effected by two very major events. Those events were the divorce of their parents and the death of their mother. Of course much has happened to these young men since this book was written in 2001.
• No Finish Line by Marla Runyan. Marla was the first legally blind athlete to compete in the Olympic games. Marla's story including some highs and many lows was inspiring.
• An American Insurrection by William Doyle. More that I ever knew about the struggle to integrate the university in Oxford Mississippi by James Meredith and the Kennedy adminstration. 
• Hits Below the Beltway by Dave Barry. First published in 2001 so much of what Mr. Barry pokes fun at in Washington is still happening or not as the case may be. Hilarious read!

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

What I Read

 Another volume of my Reader's Digest collection has been finished. I had forgotten how enjoyable it is to breeze through the condensed stories in these volumes.

I think I read Prizes by Erich Segal years ago but liked reading it again.

Eyes of a Child was frightening and I had to be careful to end on a calm part so I could sleep at night after reading some of it.

Secret Missions was set in WWII Florida and it was interesting to learn how involved in the war that state was.

More Than Meets the Eye was okay. I felt like the story needed more depth but maybe in its full form I would have liked it better.

Since I am determined to be a more active reader I have gone back to GoodReads and listed my latest reads there. I am a list maker at heart and GoodReads makes it so darn easy, I'm hooked.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Over the Weekend

I was given a couple dozen Reader's Digest books. I have lined the up on a shelf to be my bedtime reading for the next little or probably long while. I keep you informed here about progress and recording it for my own satisfaction.

When I was a kid these were some of the best books I ever read. That was at a time when I was moving from children's books to adult novels and biographies. A kind neighbor subscribed to receive the Reader's Digest volumes and let me borrow them. The first time I read "Roots" by Alex Haley it was the condensed version in one of these volumes. That was years before the miniseries came to television.

Anyway I recently posted about reading "Lake News" by Barbara Delinsky. Over the weekend on Sunday and then on Monday I read the other three books in this volume which is #6 from 1999.

Jeffery Deaver's "The Devil's Teardrop" keep surprising me with plot twists right up until the end. Nicholas Sparks wrote another tearjerker with "A Walk to Remember". The last story was "Thunderhead" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It was a great story about a mysterious hidden city in the Southwest.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Lake News by Barbara Delinsky

Compared to From Here to Eternity this was a quick and enjoyable read. The outcome of happily ever after was predictable but that is not always a bad thing, is it? I was interested in how the childish views of parents were changed as adult children interacted with their parents in difficult times.

The main story involved misinformation in print media. How fitting today. I read a lot of news and bias is easy to spot but does bias mean untruth? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.Facts are facts and digging down to them through all the noise on television and online is so hard. I say don't give up, just keep reading. Lily ( the character in the book ) didn't give up. She got to know her mother, she got an apology, she got the boy, she got happily ever after.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

I was given a copy of "From Here to Eternity" by a friend and have been reading it over the last month or so. At different times I read passages to Jim. He spent 20 years in the Navy and found parallels between shipboard life in the Navy and barracks life in the Army. I don't know about the movie, I've never seen it, but I am sure it doesn't come close to the in depth lives exposed in the story found in the pages of a ragged 60 year old copy. Alcohol, punishment, loneliness in a crowd, shallow relationships that are easily walked away from, living in the moment or rather living on paydays and then enduring the tedium until the next one.

The story takes place in peace time Hawaii and ends in the first days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. There are no happy endings here but life does go on.

The linked picture below is through Amazon and I get a little bit if you click and then make a purchase. Not much but you might help me knit a hat or two and I say thanks.




Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

Animal Farm by George Orwell

I finished two books while traveling earlier this month. I blogged about the first one, 1984 by George Orwell. The second book, Animal Farm was by the same author. Again this was a book I read the first time many, many years ago. From the Amazon site you get an introduction that starts with the following words.

George Orwell s famous satire of the Soviet Union, in which all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.Animal Farm is one of the most famous warnings ever written. 
The development from idealism that sounded so good to oppression so much more cruel than ever happened on the farm when humans ran it was so interesting to read. As with so many stories and societies there were heros to admire and villains to hate and all those in the middle just trying to get by.


The link in this post is an Amazon Affiliate link. If you use it your purchasing price won't change but I could get a few pennies for yarn money and I thank you for that.

Back with more again soon. Take care and stay cozy!

George Orwell's 1984

I read this book for the first time many, many years ago. As I am discovering the benefits of an Amazon Prime account that includes books you can download I came across the title and decided to read 1984 again. I was able to load up books on my tablet to take on our recent cruise. I like the feel of a real book in my hand as much as the next reader but the lighter luggage was nice.

This book has themes that echo fears of where our government could go now more than the when I read it the first time about 30 years ago. The book talks about a layered society with no movement from one level to another. Prols will always be prols and the Party members will always be Party members that is unless they get in trouble and then they are gone. Media in the book is not really an enemy but rather a tightly controlled, constantly adjusted, publisher of a history that fits the plans of The Party. I bet our current White House occupants, the guy at the top and his staff, would love those kinds of privileges.

It is a classic and I am glad I spent the time reading 1984 by George Orwell again.


(Amazon links in this post are affiliate links. Clicking and maybe purchasing does not change your cost but gives me a few pennies of yarn money and for that I am grateful.)