@jo, Fresh from the Country is a good one to start with, it is a standalone novel and a delightful sample of her writing. I haven't read the Fairacre series yet but my sister and I have been reading the Thrush Green series for the past several years and really love them, we only have a few left and while we have enjoyed some books more than others in the series we have not disliked any of them. You really need to read her series in order since the books build on each other (she does provide a little bit of a recap occasionally but I think it would be hard to not be confused if one started in the middle of a series).

I finished Early Days on Monday and loved it, am also really enjoying Letters to Malcolm, I got my mom to start reading it as well and she also likes it.

Facing the Mountain sounds very interesting, I am going to add it to my TBR. Thanks for drawing my attention to it, @jo.

Posted by: @valiantarcher

It's fun to have a mix of new reads and rereads, @SnowAngel! How is your yearly book goal looking?

Love love loving my reading list, but I am way off my goal of 120 books, just finished book number 93 on Saturday. However I am forty-six pages from completing my 12th nonfiction read of 2024.   It's not the Stonewall Jackson biography, I got two more nonfiction books from the library and I'm currently reading Return of the Strong Gods by R.R. Reno. But I am planning to finished the Stonewall bio this year even if I have to read all day on December 31st.  

I finished The Marquis' Secret by George MacDonald, I love Malcolm's story arc, it's one of my all-time favorites. Right now I have bookmarks in two fiction books, one is a western by Ernest Haycox and the other is the first Dana Girls mystery...but I'm thinking about starting another George MacDonald book instead. It just seems like the right kind of reading for November with the weather being warm and sunny one day and cool and cloudy the next. It's either that or I'm going to raid my sister's Perry Mason collection, hard decision to make.  

SnowAngel

@Jo, well, I made it through about 140 pages, realised roughly how much of what was left was going to cover being on a raft and a Japanese POW, and have not picked it up since. Not having a desire to keep reading is not a good sign, but I'll give it a few more days; otherwise, someone else is on hold for it at the library, so maybe I'll try it again at some point in the future.
Unfortunately, given that I can't even remember which I've read, I don't have any recommendations on where to start with the Miss Read books.
Does Facing the Mountain have the same writing style as The Boys in the Boat? I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on the Mistborn series once you finish, and I hope you have a great time with the read-along of A Christmas Carol!

Glad to hear your most recent reads have been/are a success, @Narnian-in-the-North!

Hey now, that's not so bad, @SnowAngel - only 27 books to read in a little less than two months! Joking aside, it sounds like you've been enjoying quite a lot of your reads, though, which is probably better than being able to just check another book off on your tally. And congrats on another non-fiction read!
Ha, I would vote for the mystery but I hope you enjoy the next read, whatever you decide on.

Posted by: @valiantarcher

Hey now, that's not so bad, @SnowAngel - only 27 books to read in a little less than two months! Joking aside, it sounds like you've been enjoying quite a lot of your reads, though, which is probably better than being able to just check another book off on your tally. And congrats on another non-fiction read!

Ha, I would vote for the mystery but I hope you enjoy the next read, whatever you decide on.

I might have to raid the short kids book shelves to complete the book count, might even have done that once or twice in the past to finish the year.  

I finished Return of the Strong Gods, it was very interesting. And I moved my nonfiction bookmark to The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell. I picked "easy" reads to finish the year out.  

On the fiction front, I decided to finish the books I had already started. The western was the shorter book, so I finished it first and wasn't impressed with it, so off the shelves it goes. I'm now reading By The Light Of The Study Lamp (the Dana Girls #1), it's a lot like the Nancy Drew Mysteries. One of my sisters found the first eight books in the series at a thrift shop last year, so I think I might read more than one of them over the next couple weeks before starting another George MacDonald book. 

SnowAngel

Hey, children's books can be a lot of fun (and quick to get through), @SnowAngel. I'm trying to remember - did you have a separate nonfiction goal for this year and, if so, how are you doing with that?
Nice work on getting rid of another book (always a struggle)! How are you liking the Dana Girls mysteries? I've read a few and haven't been terribly impressed, though the last one I tried was the one I really felt frustrated by.

 Reading has been slow over the past couple of weeks, but I've gotten through a few children's/juvenile books from the library and am currently also working on a collection of summaries of about 70 operas. The latter is requiring slower work and it's nice to balance it with the mostly lighter children's books, but I'm enjoying learning about an art form that I have only hodgepodge knowledge of otherwise.

I've read two books in last two...actually closer to three weeks, and they weren't even long ones. I'm definitely not getting to 120 books for the year without raiding the kids book shelves of the shortest books and maybe not even then.   Oh, well, I think I have actually read more this year than last year, just in pages and not books.

@valiantarcher, my nonfiction goal was 12 books and I completed it with Return of the Strong Gods, if I finish The Age of Entitlement and the Stonewall Jackson biography this year as well I will be a very happy girl.  

Well, since life is rather busy right now, I'm enjoying reading whenever I have time in the evenings, so I've liked the Dana Girls mysteries for that reason. However I don't think they are nearly as pleasurable to read as the Nancy Drew books and I won't go out of my way to get more of them.

SnowAngel

Ah, well. Reading more in pages vs. books is still a good success for the year, @SnowAngel! And congrats on making your nonfiction goal at least!
Yeah, I felt similarly about the Dana Girls books I read, though I wasn't sure how much of that was coming to the series much older than I read the Nancy Drew books.

 I've been all over the place on reading lately, though I recently finished Lady Susan by Jane Austen. It was quick to read and I suppose the epistolary nature was clever, but the titular character set my teeth on-edge, as well as the foolishness of some of the characters. I also sped through a collection of short anecdotes connected with music (composers, performances, musicians, etc.) that had been my grandfather's; I lacked some of the context for the stories, but it was a fun read.

I've switched from reading the Dana Girls mysteries to revisiting the Love Comes Softly series by Janette Oke, I hadn't read the series for ages and I have been wanting to read it again for sometime. It took me about a week to read Love Comes Softly and Love's Enduring Promises, I am currently on Love's Long Journey. I have really enjoyed revisiting the series, as of now I think Love Comes Softly (book 1) is still going to be my favorite or maybe Love's Unending Legacy (I'm pretty sure that's the one with Ellie and Lane).  

I am not going to make it through the Stonewall Jackson bio by Tuesday evening, so I'm putting it on the top of my list to start 2025. I did still make it to 13 nonfiction books for 2024.  

One of the books I have been most excited to read is Haunted Cosmos: Doing Your Duty In A World That's Not Just Stuff by Brian Sauvé and Ben Garrett this year. I am a few chapters in and really enjoying it. It's kind of like N.D. Wilson's Notes From A Tilt-A-Whirl and Death By Living, but better and I do like both of the aforementioned books.  

Got another nonfiction book via interlibrary loan today, so both the Jackson book and Haunted Cosmos might be slow progress for the next few weeks. My sister requested Conquers by Roger Crowley for me and it came in this week and I have four weeks before it's due back at the library.

I've not made my 2025 reading goals list yet, but I've got most of my nonfiction reads picked (basically my nonfiction purchases from the past year or so that I've not read yet) and for fiction I do have a couple series that I want to revisit. I'm working on a short stack of children's books to finish off my 2024 goal and then I will post my completed goals for 2024 and my goals for 2025.  

I'd like to do a post about a book I got for Christmas from my brother and his wife. It's a book that's about movies though so maybe it should go in the Movies thread.  

It's The Walt Disney Film Archives: The Animated Movies 1921-1968. As someone who is interested in animation and loves looking at concept art, I love getting lost in this tome's images. (The ones for deleted concepts for Fantasia are especially great. ) And the nice thing about Disney animation is that even when I'm not a fan of the movies, their visuals are great. This is a book I'd gotten through inter library loan more than once, so it's awesome to have my own copy. 

In addition to the art, each chapter also has a critical essay about each movie featured. A number of critics/writers contribute. This was probably so that each essay would be written by someone who likes the film in question and there's nobody who's going to like every one of them. I approve of that goal, but it does mean the essays vary in quality and focus. Some of them are very much critical analyses. Others are (largely fluffy) behind the scenes stories. Some are a mix of both. My least favorites are the ones by Mindy Johnson. My favorites were by Brian Sibley and Charles Solomon. 

There are two editions of this book, the original which is far more cumbersome to carry around and more expensive, and the later edition that is much more convenient. Unfortunately, the smaller edition omits some of the images that the original had as well as the story meeting notes, which I find fascinating as someone interested in the writing process. What's more, while no chapter is technically cut, some of them in the shorter version only have art and no essay. While it's true that the book's main appeal for me is to the artwork, that still feels wrong to me, especially since the choice of which ones to cut feels random. I can understand cutting essays for unpopular movies like The Reluctant Dragon but there are equally obscure ones, like Make Mine Music, that keep theirs. And then they don't have one for Lady and the Tramp, a very famous Disney movie.  

So I'm really grateful my brother and sister-in-law sprang for the heavy, expensive edition for my gift.  

Ooh, that sounds like a neat book, @col-klink.

I...I went to the library book sale on the 2nd and I bought 13 books to break my 2025 spending freeze. I'm rather miffed that the local library book sale is in January because I only don't spend money the first day of the new year and then it's all over on the 2nd. I mostly bought nonfiction, but I did get a Dashiell Hammett book that I'm pretty sure I haven't read and I'm very excited to read it. 

I think I'll just give up on clearing space on my bookshelves/making them fit, just work on curating the collection.  

I just barely made 110 books in 2024, I was hoping for 120, but I am satisfied with what I did read for the year. I read 13 nonfiction (goal was 12), about the Crusades (3 books), The Case For Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe, a commentary by Michael Card, finished Wimpy, Weak, and Woke by John L.  Cooper, and read about the Civil War (Is Davis A Traitor? by Albert Taylor Bledsoe).

On the fiction front goals completed, I read the Stuart Brannon series by Stephen Bly (I have read this one a few times before and always enjoy it), a couple of Georgette Heyer novels, a couple of George MacDonald novels, the Drew Farthering mysteries by Julianna Deering, and several westerns from my growing collection of vintage paperbacks. There were obliviously many more books, but these were some of the highlights/goals for the year. 

Goals for 2025 - 120 books total - still going to try for more than two books a week.

Nonfiction goals: minimum of 12 full length books, finish the Stonewall Jackson biography, read about Jedidiah Smith, The New Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden (Crusades), Honor Thy Fathers by Zachary Garris (theology), The Real Lincoln by Thomas Dilorenzo (Civil War), and Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides (Kit Carson). Still need to pick a commentary to read.

Fiction goals: finish rereading the Love Comes Softly series, reread some N.D. Wilson, work my way through a stack of westerns (number currently unknown), read a George MacDonald novel, and reread Legends of Laramie by Sigmund Brouwer. I'll probably add to this list over the next couple months.

Today I finished O. Henry at the Holidays, a collection of stories by O. Henry with one for each (American) holiday. O. Henry is an author whom I really want to love. He has such a great writing style and, for the most part, such fun plots. Yet somehow, I have a hard time getting into his stories even if I do love them when I'm finished. And this is the first collection of them that I've gotten all the way through. (Ordinarily, I get bored halfway.)

And that's probably more because this was shorter than the collections I've previously tried rather than because it had the best selection. While the idea of doing a story for every holiday is fun in theory, I found it distracting in practice. The connections between the stories and the holidays were often tenuous and I kept racking my brain to figure out what they were. (For example, the story for St. Patrick's Day has an Irish narrator and... that's it.) Also, since many modern American holidays are about celebrating minority cultures, there ended up being an unusually high number of, shall we say, racially insensitive stories in this particular collection. 

Still, there were more good stories in the book than otherwise IMO. I've made a little list of the best ones. (The last two are no-brainers, being O. Henry's most famous work, but what can I say? They deserve it.) Warning: Included in this list are some-one anyway-that fall under the racially insensitive category. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy them anyway. 

• A Service of Love
• The Guardian of the Accolade 
• Cupid a la Carte
• A Philistine in Bohemia
• Blind Man's Holiday
• The Shamrock and the Palm
• The Red Roses of Tonia
• The Reformation of Calliope
• The Church with an Overshot Wheel
• Vanity and Some Sables
• The Ransom of Red Chief
• The Gift of the Magi

Just a fairly quick pop-on post. This morning I had arranged for our piano tuner to come by another residence to tune a newly-acquired piano, and because it needed more work than usual, I brought a book along as the tuner worked hard at restoring this older upright grand.

I am in the middle of a few great books now, but the one I began this morning is entitled The Major and the Missionary by Diana Pavlac Glyer, published by the Rabbit Room Press (of Andrew Peterson fame). You may know the author from her books The Company They Keep (the Inklings' as writers) and Bandersnatch (how the Inklings' conversations influenced their writings). I am hooked already on The Major and the Missionary! This is a compilation of the letters passed between Warren ('Warnie') Lewis and a missionary in Papua New Guinea, Blanche Biggs (a native Tasmanian). What started out as a question for Warnie regarding Blanche's own collection of writings became a good friendship over four years. A fascinating read, which gives further insight into both fascinating people, but, for me, especially Warnie, who often is left in the background of his brother's huge shadow.

Other books I am into now:

*Heidi:a well-beloved childhood classic that partly caused me to love the name 'Heidi' but also glorious alpine vistas ... and snow!)

*The Silmarillion: it is time for a re-read!

*21 Servants of Sovereign Joy by John Piper: an 800 page tome of marvelous and informative biographies on heroes of the faith such as Augustine, Martin Luther, John Newton, William Wilberforce, John Owen, C.S. Lewis, George Müller, Hudson Taylor, among others.

@SnowAngel, how is your Love Comes Softly reread coming along? And did you decide on a favourite book this time around?
Oh no about the January 2nd booksale! Sounds like you did a good job last year with reading and that you've got a good list for this year, though.

@Col-Klink, that sounds like an interesting book and I'm glad you've gotten to enjoy it. And congrats on making it through the O. Henry collection!

@Jo, sounds like you've got some good reads going currently!

I'm currently reading The Little Guide to Music Appreciation by Helen L. Kaufmann. It's part of a little set of books about music (there's a dictionary of music terms, a book about musical anecdotes, and a history of music) and was first published in 1942. Some of it is dated and I'm working through it a bit more slowly than I expected, but it's good to refresh my memory on some things (such as some music theory and information on orchestras) and also learn about some aspects of music I've never really studied. I'm thinking I might read the history book next so that I can get the set off my to-read shelf as I've already read the anecdotes one and I won't count the dictionary.

@col-klink, I only ever read O. Henry in school, aside from The Gift of the Magi, I don't remember any specific stories. It's always interesting to me when authors/stories that I had to read in school are mentioned in the wild and I'm like oh I know this one, but then also I currently have zero actual interest in it.  

@ValiantArcher, I am at the beginning of the final book of the Love Comes Softly series, Love Finds A Home. I was correct Love's Unending Legacy is one of my favorites in the series, but Love Comes Softly has to be number one, I forgot how much I like Clark and Marty's story. I'm so glad I decided to revisit the Love Comes Softly series, although I freely admit I have tried to have been reading fairly quickly through the final books in the series, so I can move onto The Hunter and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett. I was super close to starting into the Dashiell Hammett book after I finished book 4 of 8, but I hate switching books/authors in the middle of a series. So I managed to refrain and now I have nearly reached my goal...and also I did want to read Love's Unending Legacy because it has my favorite cover in the series.  

I might still need to read some more Janette Oke this year, I've been thinking it's probably time to read Seasons of the Heart again. I had to look up the title of the series because my siblings and I always called them the Josh books growing up and it's stuck so hard, I can hardly ever remember their actual name.

Oh, Heidi would be a good one to read again, so glad you mentioned it, @Jo. My fiction reading list for the year is shaping up to a good length and has some nice variety now.

As of now I'm focusing my nonfiction reading time on Conquerors by Roger Crowley since it's an unrenewable library book due at the end of the month, before I continue reading Haunted Cosmos and work on the Stonewall Jackson bio. I'm down to the final 87 pages. Although at times I have found Conquerors to move rather slowly, overall it's been an interesting read and I've enjoyed learning about another era and place.