Books I Want to Read Before the End of the Year

I’m currently reading The Bookshop on the Corner (published as The Little Shop of Happy Ever After in the UK) for the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club. It’s been on my radar for awhile now, as I love the idea of books about books, but I actually don’t read too many of them. I’m only a few pages in, but already love the style of the writing and am looking forward to cozying up with this one over the weekend.

Nina is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more. Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile — a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling. 

I first read The Poisonwood Bible in high school and I remember liking it, but that’s pretty much it. I also know I didn’t appreciate the books I was assigned back then. So, I’m rereading it. I actually don’t reread many books, so am excited to start rereading the books I read as a teenager.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Educated is the first book of the Diversify Your Reading Challenge, and I’m hoping to get a head start on it this month so I can kickstart the discussion in January. I’ve seen this book over and over again throughout 2018 and am looking forward to finally reading it myself.

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

This book doesn’t come out until January, but I have an ARC that I am dying to start. One of my goals for 2019 is to read more YA, and Outside seems like a great one to start with.

Here’s the thing about being Inside. Ain’t no one believes that they are.
Ele has never been Outside.
She has never seen a tree or felt the rain.
Her whole world is Inside
With her books and the Others and Him.
But here’s the secret . . .
Ele’s getting out.
For good.