*Book Group Selection | Bolded Means Favorite
Picture Books
*Ahoy! by Sophie Blackall
*The Last Zookeeper by Aaron Becker
Middle Grade
*Kyra, Just for Today by Sara Zarr
No matter the protagonist, Sara Zarr writes them so you root for them and also want to give them a big hug. It was also interesting to see how holding together the household and being A+ in that category meant that she had trouble keeping up in school.
*The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly
Nice job writing about 1999 and providing a sci-fi twist. I love Entrada Kelly’s characterization.
*The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy
It’s an age-appropriate book about a member of a cult! The story traces Fern’s attempts to get back to the cult, the place she has been the happiest, and also her evolving thoughts about life outside the cult. There’s also an idyllic California beach town and people who help Fern and her mother adjust to their new lives.
Young Adult
*Black Girl You Are Atlas by Renée Watson and Ekua Holmes
*Icarus by K. Ancrum
Wide Awake Now by David Levithan
Young Nonfiction
*American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky by Sherri L. Smith and Elizabeth Wein
*My Antarctica: True Adventures in the Land of Mummified Seals, Space Robots, and So Much More by G. Neri and Corban Wilkin
Grownup Fiction
Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner
Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon
The Partner Track by Helen Wan
Hoo-boy do I dislike the law office culture on display in this novel. Wan kept me reading through my dislike with a well-formed main character to root for.
Grownup Nonfiction
The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster by Steve Dalton
Breaks the scary task of networking down to efficient and manageable tasks.
The Job Closer: Time-Saving Techniques for Acing Resumes, Interviews, Negotiations, and More by Steve Dalton
The companion to the 2-Hour Job Search, this book also got me to stop obsessing over resumes (strive for error-free—no one really reads them all the way through) and cover letters (he gives a framework) and made updating my LinkedIn profile a breeze. He also discusses how to interview, how to negotiate, and how to get off to a great start at your new company.
Dalton’s two books are making my job search less of a herculean task.
Beyond Getting By: The Financial Diet’s Guide to Abundant and Intentional Living by Holly Trantham and Lauren Ver Hage
This wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I’m looking for a process to decide who to donate money to as well as something to help me understand the tradeoff of increasing my retirement contributions another percentage point annually given my current percentage.
While this didn’t meet my needs, it was full of good information and written in a breezy style. I suspect that the 32 hour workweek won’t be widely adopted in my working lifetime as it has at the Financial Diet, but it would be nice.
Rebel With A Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian by Ellen Jovin
A good book for the room in your house where you spend time intermittently and need something you can pick up and put down. The grammar information was good, and the writing about grammar was engaging, but I found eventually found repetitive setup of each vignette tedious. Her descriptions of the people visiting the grammar table were particularly annoying annoying after a while.