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Joined: Apr 4, 2008

Real Name

Sharon

About My Library

The library is a combination of my husband's and my interests. The cookbooks and psychotherapy books are his. Of the rest, he's read more than I since he's faster. We seldom both read the same book since we hear enough of each other's reading that we're more interested in reading something completely fresh and new. Naturally some books inspire reading by both.

Since downsizing in 2012, most of these books are no longer in our possession and are in the "Discard" category. New books are now mostly Kindle, Early Review, or from the library.

About Me

I am in my mid 70s; a chemist by profession whose friends from high school on have been almost exclusively English or Psych majors. I have always read about 50/50 fiction/nonfiction with particular interests in people and what makes them tick, history, anthropology, and sociology. Upon retirement, I have taken up writing and with the encouragement of a weekly workshop wrote a memoir and a number of poems. I published a book, In the Beacon Light Lambertville, NJ, 1860 to 1900. It's a history of Lambertville, NJ as portrayed by the local newspaper of the time, The Lambertville Beacon. As such it depicts the everyday life of that time. A second book, A Great and Noble Work: The Volunteer Refreshment Saloons of Philadelphia During the Civil War, was published a couple of years ago.

Read in 2023

House of Meetings by Martin Amis
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
Untouchable by Milk Raj Anand
Amalgamemnon by Christine Brooke-Rose
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Following the Path of Water by Kay Peters
At Fault by Kate Chopin
Wise Children by Angela Carter
On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee
My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Kevin Powell Reader by Kevin Powell
Refugee by Lukacs John Varda
What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies
Rock Springs: Stories by Richard Ford
The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper
Victory by Joseph Conrad
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
The Secrets of the Moon by Andrew Osiow
Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Zigzag Way by Anita Desai
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
Making the Low Notes by Bill Harrison
Junk Science by M. Chris Fabricant
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Favorites in 2022

1) The Dawn of Everything by David Graeter and David Wengrow
2) The Promise by Damon Galgut
3) The Prodigal Son by Edward Villella
4) The Uninnocent: Notes on Violence and Mercy by Katherine Blake
5) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
6) The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz

Favorites of 2021

Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
American Nations by Colin Woodward
The End of Bias by Jessica Nordell
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer 

Favorites in 2020 (although there were a large number of excellent books read)

1) An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alamaddine
2) Empire Falls by Richard Russo
3) The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
4) Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout
5) Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Favorites of 2019

1) Eventide by Kent Haruf
2) Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
3) Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehishi Coates
4) King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
5) A Wilder Time by William E. Glassley
6) Bad Stories by Steve Alford
7) The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce

Favorites of 2018

1) Plainsong by Kent Haruf
2) Hillbilly Elegy by JC Vance
3) Nomadland by Jessica Bruder
4) The Life Before Us by Romain Gary
5) Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen
6) Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
7) The Truth about Fat by Anthony Warner

Favorites of 2017

1) A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
2) News of the World by Paulette Jiles
3) We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
4) Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
5) Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine] by Gail Honeyman
6) I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yung
7) Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari
8) Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Favorites of 2016

Euphoria by Lily King
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Turner House by Angela Floury
Flow by Beth Kephart
Rogue Justice by Karen J. Greenberg
River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
Life Breaks In by Mary Cappello
The All of It by Jeannette Haien

Favorites of 2015

Lila by Marilynne Robinson
The Neapolitan Series of 4 by Elena Ferrante
Less Medicine, More Health by H. Gilbert Welch
H is for Hawk
Love and Fury: A Memoir
Brewster by Mark Slouka
Life on the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Favorites of 2014

The Thing with Feathers
How to Read the Air
Journey by Moonlight
Dr Mutter's Marvels
There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani
How We Die
How to Be Victorian
Stoner by John Williams
Someone by Alice McDermott
The Understory: A Novel by Pamela Erens

Favorites of 2013
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Walkable City by Jeff Speck
Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

My favorite books from 2012
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Poisonwood Bible
West from Appomattox

Favorite books of 2011
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Red Heat by Alex Von Tunzelmann
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer
A History of the World Since 9/11 by Dominic Streatfeild
The Memory of Love
The Portrait of a Lady

Favorite books of 2010
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction by Sondra Perl and
Mimi Schwartz
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Hurston
Constantinople: City of the World's Desire
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years by Richard Fortey
India: A History by John Keay
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

Favorite Books of 2009
Wild Swans
The Last Lincolns
Lark and Termite
Columbine
The Hummingbird's Daughter
Confederates in the Attic
Memoirs of a Giesha
Olive Kitteridge
The Help
The White Tiger
Life of Pi

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