FTWBooks2024

This was one of the Washington Post's  10 best romance novels of 2022.  I rarely read romance novels, but it was recommended and I decided to try it. Cassie sees this handsome woman at a bar on Family weekend at her college.  There seems to be an attraction and the two of them end up making out in the bathroom of  the bar. The next morning, Cassie is invited to breakfast with her best friend and her best friend's mother.  Imagine the shock when the mother turns out to be the woman she'd been with the night before.  This sets up a strange relationship between the feelings Cassie and Erin have for each other, their fear that Erin's daughter will find out, and their unsuccessful attempts to end the relationship. The book was better than I expected but if I were to give it stars, it would be 4 out of 5 because while there is a lot of graphic sex. it ends up getting boring.  Also, as the relationship progresses, Erin, who is 40, starts acting like a teen ag...

This is a very short (but seemingly complete) biography of Rachel Maddow. I first "met" Rachel Maddow when she was a fill in for Keith Olberman, when he wasn't able to do his show.  Several people filled in for him but Maddow stood out from all the others.  Apparently she was so popular filling in for Olberman that he recommended she get her own show in 2008.  I was thrilled. Following its debut, the show topped  Countdown  as the highest-rated show on MSNBC on several occasions.  After being on air for more than a month, Maddow's program doubled the audience that hour.  This show made Maddow the first openly gay or lesbian host of a primetime news program in the United States. Wikipedia has a long entry about her, which has a long, long list of awards she has won.   This book isn't an in depth discussion of her life, but it was an interesting read.  

 After reading "The Situation Room" I really wanted an easy book to read.  I was remembering all those years I read the Walter Farley books and how much I loved the Island Stallion, so I decided waned to read it again. This is a YA book about Steve Duncan, who is invited by Pitch, a family friend, to join him visiting a deserted island in the Caribbean.  Pitch is an archaeologist and wants to explore the island, which was once occupied by the Spanish in the 17th century.  Steve knows there are horses on the island and he just wants to see the horses. The two find a hidden entrance to the island which nobody knows about and by following many tunnels they discover there is a valley in the middle of the island, which is home to a herd of horses.  Pitch finds numerous artifacts of the Spanish life on the Island and Steve finds the red stallion he has been dreaming about, a stallion he has named, in his dreams, "Flame." Flame is a wild stallion but is challenged firs...

I saw Stephanopoulos interviewed on TV about his just released book, and, being a fan, I had to get it. I finished it in 2 days. The Situation Room was started during the Kennedy administration, after the disaster of the Bay of Pigs.  Though Kennedy took responsibility for what happened, if he had had the information that he would have gotten through the staff of a Situation Room, he would have made different choices. After that the Situation Room became a regular, growing with each administration.     The Sit Room  has been the epicenter of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades.  Stephanopoulos tells all the stories. This is an amazing book.  It reads like a crime drama...you know all the incidents that he's talking about, but when you see them from inside the Situation Room, there are twists and turns and surprises you never dreamed of. I was first amazed to read about Nixon's administration and how pretty much he didn't do much ...

When her brother died,  2 years after  their mother's death, Whoopi Goldberg realized that there was nobody to share her memories of childhood.  I kind of got that idea in the other direction, when I reconnected with my cousin, with whom I grew up, and we started sharing memories and I realized how much I'd forgotten and how wonderful it was to talk with someone who had the same memories. Whoopi especially wanted to share memories of her mother, a single mother who raised 2 kids with essentially no money, but was able to feed them get them to arts events around New York, create a magical Christmas every year, etc.  She never answered questions about how she did it. At one point during her childhood, her mother had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for two years, while relatives and friends took turns taking care of the kids.  When she was released, she didn't know her kids.  But gradually she became the mother they remembered. This is a beautiful, sw...

Crichton's wife said that he was "far enough along that I was left with a cliffhanger that was completely unexpected" and so she wanted the book to be finished and knew she needed another author to finish it. She was a fan of James Patterson and knew that he had what the book needed--that "page turning, and attention to character" and she felt "why would I go anywhere but 'big.'" She needed two great minds collaborating together to get the book finished. Patterson says he's been a big Crichton fan forever, that he'd read all of his novels.  He says that this book is the kind of book you don't always get...the kind where you want to keep reading, but you don't want it to end. I got it for my kindle the day it was released.  It's 429 pages and I read it in a day and a half.  It is definitely a page-turner, though there are parts that are so esoteric, with scientific information about the volcano that I kind of skipped over the...