Started reading Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. It's so engaging!

Finished The Witch Elm - Tana French. It was good, but I liked The Searcher better.

Now reading Magic Lessons - Alice Hoffman. I loved the movie Practical Magic when it came out. So of course I got the book, which was very different from the movie. One of the few times I've liked a movie better than the book. So going to read the books chronologically, rather than in the order they were written. They are talking about make another movie. So want to give the books a chance before the movie comes out.

The Litigators by John Grisham

FitMary202 wrote: »

Looks like I might have to replace my Kindle. It's starting to refuse to load my books. It IS a really old one, but it's disappointing all the same. I'm not at all sure that books I've had for years will transfer to the new device. To be continued after I play around with it just a bit more...

I look at Woot, it is an Amazon owned company, they run deals on refurbished Kindles CHEAP! They had some today but they are all sold out now, rats. A 2021 11th Generation Paperwhite was $70, Amazon Refurbished. I found that those have zero problems, good strong batteries, and no scuff marks too, they are simply cheaper. Keep your eyes peeled on Woot! All of your purchases should be in the Amazon cloud, I have a lot of kindle e-books. My Kindle Oasis from 2018 won't keep a charge anymore, I should recycle it. I have a Signature Paperwhite I bought off Woot that I am using currently, all of my old purchases transfer but it is a pain to download them all to it. Good luck.

I'm now reading They Went Left by Monica Hesse, it's about a Jewish girl looking for her brother after being liberated from a concentration camp after WWII. It's pretty good so far.

@Catfish_Fan! It was so incredibly kind of you to send me the info on Woot. I read the message late so everything was all sold out, but REALLY appreciate the thoughtfulness and I'm glad to learn about the site. In the end I got an "older" model from Target where I also had a coupon. I love it, and everything transferred like a dream. Should I splurge on some new kindle books in celebration? Yes, that's what I think too!

@FitMary202 so glad you got your Kindle issue sorted out with the help of @Catfish_Fan.

Fortunately for you both you can't hear me singing "I get by with a little help from my friends". LOL! I'm terribly tone deaf.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich was very good, it reminded me of Evicted by Matthew Desmond. Or maybe the other way around since Barbara's book was written in 2001. She spends time working as a low paid or minimum wage earning woman in three areas of the country trying to get by on that wage following Welfare Reform during the Clinton Administration (requiring work and kicking people off public assistance), working two jobs and attempting to afford rent AND food simultaneously as a healthy person without skills. She showed how much skill is actually required (quite a lot) to do those jobs which are not easy, are degrading in many ways, and how hard she worked to attempt a living. She failed, she could not do it on the income, and showed exactly why. She was a healthy woman with no extra medical costs so that factor was not in her equation--with it there would have been no way at all. She showed how just getting a job and working hard was not the ticket out of poverty that it was promised to be at all, in fact it made the problem for many poor people worse.

In Matthew Desmond's book he spent time living in low-income housing and trying to get by, while Barbara did that as a single woman and working those jobs as a everything from a waitress, then a cleaning lady, and finally a salesperson at Walmart, and despite doing a good job at work she was not doing a good job of making ends meet. The rising cost of rent (back in the late 90s) and those low wages did not allow the math to work. I'm sorry to say that the situation today in America is much, much worse. Barbara did a great job of illustrating the problem, but not of offering solutions to it that would help the working poor.

Now I am reading a lighter book, a western by JA Johnstone, book 2 in the Rattlesnake Wells, Wyoming trilogy, Frontier of Violence. I like these for a breather between deeper or more concentration draining books. Time for being entertained by my read.

@Btrflydog that song is definitely meant to be sung off key!!

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy: If you are a fan of heartwarming feel-good stories this book is for you. An elderly widow returns from 60 years in Australia to the English village, where she was raised but now knows nobody, just to exist in solitude and wait for death. Then, she accidently brings a mouse into the house, who turns out to be a friendly little squirt, probably an abandoned pet. She steps out into the village and begins to make friends through her efforts to humanely remove the rodent, then deciding to care for him, finding a reason to join life and relationships again. 5*

The Outlaw Noble Salt by Amy Harmon: My how I loved this book, imagining a different ending to Butch and Sundance. Affable wanted outlaw Butch (alias Noble Salt) falls hard for an opera singer and goes to Paris to seek her out. She has a son by a vile abusive English Earl, who considers her his property. She has a plan to escape by sneaking off on a concert tour of America and asks Butch to come with her as her bodyguard, not knowing about his outlaw past and the risk posed by both the Pinkertons and the Earl who will soon be on their trail. 5*

I read a pair of JA Johnstone Westerns with an Audible Original crammed in between, a science fiction book in the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. The premise of that series is witty and humorous, so all of these reads have been light and not too serious, a nice change.

I'm now beginning Gallant by V.E. Schwab which won the Goodreads Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2022. It is good so far, 20% into it, and it is a short read. I found it in Kindle Unlimited.

I want to read the Alice Hoffman series too, but I haven't yet decided in which order, chronological like you chose or in publication order. The author says she doesn't recommend one method over another, it is your choice.

I'm reading The Wheel of Darkness (Agent Pendergast series book 8) by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It has been a while since I last read a book in this series and I find it entertaining, as long as it isn't in a story-arc I can pick it up where I left off and not miss a lick. I'm reading several series that are quite long this way, with lots of other books in between.

I read his Mercy trilogy and really enjoyed it. He's written so much. I definitely will have to check out A Calamity of Souls.

I'm reading the Pulitzer Prize winning historical fiction novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

In the WW2 historical fiction book I just read the girl was reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne in braille, and I was interested in the story, I have never read it, so it is my current read right now.

I am finishing Chapterhouse Dune by Frank Herbert, book 6 of his original Dune series before he passed away. I am glad to be finishing it. Books 1, 2, and 3 were really good. Book 4 I didn't get, Maud'dib's son Leto II was a sandworm and had lived thousands of years... Hmmm.... Now I am in book 6 and it is like 10,000 years after book 1 and they are still messing with clones of a character that was in book 1. Why that is escapes me. The worldbuilding is ok, I like the sci-fi universe Herbert created, but I don't know where this book is going and I am almost done with it. Oh well, I can say I read the Dune series now.