Category: Kelly

As part of my New Year’s Resolutions, I am working through my To Be Read shelf and tracking the books I read in an effort to be more mindful about my reading and more critical in my thinking.

I have two competing genres for my favorite type of book to read. One (the better one to talk about at cocktail parties) is narrative nonfiction, where a historical event is put into context through telling the story of one or two people who took part in it. (My other favorite genre is the Schmaltzy Novel, which will always remain near and dear to my heart, and which is critically underappreciated and undervalued.)

The book selection for April, The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, is a classic example of the first of my favorite kind of book to read. It tells the story of two men who were instrumental in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which turned out to be a more monumental task than the people who conceived of it could even imagine when they started. I had actually already read this a number of years ago, but must have picked it up at a thrift store or used book shop. It is definitely going into our permanent collection.

As part of my New Year’s Resolutions, I am working through my To Be Read shelf and tracking the books I read in an effort to be more mindful about my reading and more critical in my thinking.

I had been looking forward to reading What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn, but I did not finish it. Good Reads describes it as:

The 1980s: Ten-year-old Kate Meaney – with her ‘Top Secret’ notebook and Mickey her toy monkey – is busy being a junior detective. She observes goings-on and follows ‘suspects’ at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping centre and in her street, where she is friends with the newsagent’s son, Adrian. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press.

Then, in 2004, Lisa is working as a deputy manager at Your Music, a cut-price record store. Every day, under the watchful eye of the CCTV, she tears her hair out at the behaviour of her customers and colleagues. But when she meets security guard Kurt, she becomes entranced by the little girl he keeps glimpsing on the centre’s CCTV. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, they investigate how these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks.

I loved the depiction of Kate. She truly was an interesting, quirky character. An attaching, funny girl who has her own set of problems and too much to handle, so tries to control the uncontrollable by observing everything. Halfway through the book the author killed her off, and that broke one of my two book reading laws: no dead children and nothing about WWII. I was done.