The Fifth Tuesday Of March

A Special Report for Book Lovers

Greetings! It is my habit to post a new blog on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month. But what happens when there are five Tuesdays? It seems like the perfect opportunity to share the top five book reviews from the Book Blog section of my website.

Before we start, though, if you love to read lists of book recommendations and need even more, please see the PS at the end of this report.

That said, here are the books I enjoyed most in the last several months:

• News of the World – Civil War veteran, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, works to return a ten-year-old girl – who had been abducted by Indians four years earlier – to her family 400 miles away. If the title sounds familiar, it’s because it is now a motion picture starring Tom Hanks and because it was a National Book Award finalist.
• Evvie Drake Starts Over – This book asks the question, what happens when your lifelong path dead ends? In the book, Evvie and Dean strike up a friendship by making a deal that he won’t ask about her dead husband, and she won’t ask about his dead career in baseball.
• The Midnight Library – The Midnight Library is the place between life and death where you can not only review your “book of regrets,” but you can try to fix them.
• The One and Only Ivan – If you cried when you read Charlotte’s Web to your children, prepare to sob when you read The One and Only Ivan to your grandkids. I loved this book. So did the panel who picked it as the Newberry Medal Winner for 2013. So did the folks who turned it into a film that was released in 2020 by Disney+.
• American Dirt – In this book, the reader experiences 19 days and 1626 miles of the migrant experience. I was terrified throughout the reading of this book. The last 50 pages were almost unbearable. I am impressed with the author’s writing skills to evoke so much emotion in me and to give me such empathy for the migrant experience.

If you would like to read new Book Blogs as I post them, follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest and watch for new posts on Tuesdays. 

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And now, here’s the PS:

Did you know that NPR has created a “Book Concierge” at the end of every year since 2013? It is different from most other best-books-of-the-year lists because it is not a list per se, it is an interactive, mix and match, Venn diagram of book topics to help you find the perfect book.

There are two dozen-ish filters to use such as Staff Picks, Biography & Memoir, Book Club Ideas, For History Lovers, Funny Stuff, etc. You can view these categories one by one, or you can overlap them to see where they intersect, just like the Venn diagram I mentioned. For instance, the Staff Picks filter for 2020 gives me 195 books. When I add a second filter, Biography & Memoir, that brings my choices down to 37. If I add a third filter, Funny Stuff, four books remain. It’s very cool! Check it out!

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And here’s a CALL TO ACTION:

If you LOVE my book reviews, you will LOVE my book, Love, Loss, and Moving On. It is available on Amazon as an eBook and as a paperback. Please have a look!