books I've read

Anne Hawn's books

Who Moved My Cheese?
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
Scientific Secrets for Self-Control
Just One Damned Thing After Another
The Vanishing
Exercises in Knitting
The Good Dream
The Very Best of Edgar Allan Poe
The Chosen
BT-Kids' Knits
Talking God
The Professor
The Christmas Files
The Finisher
Home Decor for 18-Inch Dolls: Create 10 Room Settings with Furniture and 15 Outfits with Accessories
Dracula and Other Stories
A New Song
Christy
All Quiet on the Western Front
File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents


Anne Hawn Smith's favorite books »

I'm reading 150 Books

2019 Reading Challenge
2019 Reading Challenge 19614 members
<b>Are you ready to set your 2019 reading goal?</b> This is a supportive, fun group of people looking for people just like you. Track your annual reading goal here with us, and we have challenges, group reads, and other fun ways to help keep you on pace. There will never be a specific number of books to read here or pressure to read more than you can commit to. Your goal is five? Great! You think you want to read 200? Very cool! We won't kick you out for not participating regularly, but we'll love it if you do. Join us!

Books we've read

The Help
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The Night Circus
The Golden Compass
11/22/63
The Little Lady Agency
Catch-22
The Good Father
A Discovery of Witches
The Knife of Never Letting Go
Fahrenheit 451
Frankenstein
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
A Christmas Carol
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
The Color Purple
Matched
Cloud Atlas
The Princess Bride
The Catcher in the Rye


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Thursday, December 02, 2004

The Red Tent

The Red Tent The Red Tent by Anita Diamant


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood - the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers - Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah - the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate connection with the past. Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction: a new view of biblical women's society.

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Wednesday, March 17, 2004

The Sherwood Ring

The Sherwood RingThe Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my all time favorite books. I finally managed to get a copy when it came back in print. It is the story of a young woman who comes to spend the summer with her uncle in the old Revolutionary home which is also populated with a number of ghosts. She has a relationship with the ghosts and a young man she meets on her way to the house. It is a delightful book! While it isn't quite as exciting as it was when I first read it about 45 years ago, it is still a great story.


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Thursday, January 01, 2004

Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)

Angels & Demons  (Robert Langdon, #1)Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I felt really betrayed with this book in several ways.

1. The ending is all wrong. The reader is led down one path and is waiting for the ending to resolve all the false clues and suddenly, from left field, comes the perpetrator.

2. The ending is inconsistent with what you know about the characters. I hate this. If people are going to act in a psychotic way, there are clues to their behavior in everyday life. On the surface, sociopaths can fool a lot of people, but in reality, there are always signs and eventually the people around then feel uneasy. Something is not right. Serial killers are usually dysfunctional individuals who are most frequently loners. Brown ignores this and gives us a murderer that is not plausible.

3. The author has a hidden agenda and betrays the reader with it. This, I think, bothered me the most. Until the end, I thought that Brown wrote with compassion and understanding, but in the end he tries to manipulate the reader.

4. The numerous false leads are either inadequately explained or simply don't exist. A writer, no matter how thrilling the middle chapters of his book are, doesn't get a free ride in the last chapter. Things need to be explained, clues need to be sorted out and resolved. Characters need to burst forth in the clothing they have been wearing throughout the novel, not a new and bizarre garb. If it has been a costume, the reader needs to be able to see where he was mislead, and it has to make sense.

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