How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees

Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 - edited and with an Introduction by Douglas Brinkley

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh.

I am halfway through The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. I plan to finish it in 2021.

Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar but he has not long left London's Victoria Station and just arrived at the Gare de Lyons to catch the Orient Express. Let us hope all the passengers arrive safely at Istanbul.

Almost finished with Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell. I liked her book on Doc Holliday called, Doc, and this one focuses on the Earp brothers and the gunfight at the OK corral. Not your standard westerns.

Silent In The Grave by Deanna Raybourn

Deadlock by Catherine Coulter

Lost River, Daniel Fulmer

Roxanna, I read The Children's Blizzard a few years ago - what did you think of it? I found it interesting and informative, but didn't agree with his faulting of the nascent Weather Service for failing to predict the storm and get the information out - we tend to forget how satellites and other modern technologies have changed weather prediction.

The last book I finished in 2020 was Saving Simon, about a rescue donkey, and I spent the last day of 2020 reading but not quite finishing John Garth's book about the places that inspired Tolkien's Middle-Earth landscapes.

The last book I finished in 2020 was Little Faith by Nickolas Butler, which I described in the December reading thread. The book I was reading when the clock struck midnight (though not literally) was How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny.

I'm not very far along in the Penny book because on New Year's Eve I began working a very difficult jigsaw puzzle that a friend gave me as a birthday gift a few weeks ago. The picture is the front page of the New York Times as it appeared on the day I was born. Lovely idea, but boy, it's a hard one - taking lots of my time.

Roxanna and Donnamira - The book, The Children's Blizzard, which both of you mentioned, caught my eye. (I love snow books.) When I checked my library website I was surprised to find that two authors have tackled this subject, though the Laskin book is nonfiction and the Benjamin book is a novel. Interesting. I wonder which one I should read?

Kathy, apparently you don't live in any parts of the northeast where we welcomed 46 inches of snow recently.......blizzard, not a fan !

My last book finished in 2020 was The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner.

Lost River is by David Fulmer, not Daniel, in case anyone is interested.

The last book I finished was There There. by Tommy Orange.

Donnamira - Makes sense to me!
Yoyobon - Yeah, I know, but I can't help it that I'm a winter person - in the minority for sure.

Just to say, the Children's blizzard was in 1888. There was also a famous blizzard in New York City that same year. I don't know if they were part of the same storm system or not.

Good question! I looked both up, and they were different systems. The children’s blizzard was in January, the New York blizzard was a nor’easter in March.

Agatha Christie's Miss Marple Complete Short Stories. I got it for Christmas--couldn't believe there was a word by Agatha Christie I had not read. Not a short story fan but enjoyed these very much. Now on to the Hercule Poirot short stories.

Ginny, I think that during the Thirties, popular authors wrote short stories for magazines. Publishers have trawled back-copies to make up collections

It is interesting to see that some stories were the basis of later books.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

My final book of the year was the longest one I read in 2020, at 500+ pages: The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser. Pretty interesting reading, and well written. I had previously given up on another book that partially covered the same material (a history of the Tudors), but was so detailed and dry that I gave up on it.