Erin and Vinay host a Facebook group that sets up two 4-month reading challenges with competitions each year. Participants are required to read ten books in the four months of each challenge. The most recent BCBE has run from July 1st and ends October 31st. I believe the next one will run January to April 2021. I always complete this far too late to win any prizes, so I’d don’t even bother to tally my score. This is really great fun! #bookchallengebyerin

FREEBIE (min 200 pages): The High Rise in Fort Fierce by Paul Carlucci

Paul Carlucci is a Canadian author (who seems to go to great pains to disguise that fact) of mostly, if not completely, short stories.

High Rise is a collection of linked short stories that reveal a novel’s plot by the end of the book. Somewhere, I heard that Fort Fierce is modeled on Fort McMurry in northern Alberta, and home of a lot of Atlantic Canadians – so, of course, I had to read it.

It’s one of those books that you want to read again from the beginning – but I had to return it to the library. It’s rather brilliant, really. 4 stars

 
STARTS WITH “S”: So Big by Edna Ferber

So Big is a modern classic – and the winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize. It’s billed as the story of Selina Peake DeJong, but was really about her son Dirk, a nobody from a little truck farm in south Chicago who made it big. Wikipedia says it was modeled on a real-life woman.

I agree with Ferber who said of it: “It had no plot at all, as book plots go”, and further remarked that “it was a story of the triumph of failure.” 4 stars

 
Title has a PREPOSITION: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
4½ stars

 
ODD NUMBER in a series: Shadow Dancing by Julie Mulhern #7 Country Club Murders

This delightful murder mystery series is set in 1971 Kansas City. Despite the fact that I really don’t like romance in my murder mysteries and that Ellison Russel would probably snub me if we ever met, I can’t help but like her and root for her relationship with the handsome homicide detective (whom the author has styled on Steve McQueen).

All of the book titles in the Country Club Murders series are based on songs from the era, and the covers are all of the same design. Especially if you are of a certain age, you just have to try it. 4½ stars

 
SET IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY: Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
4 stars

FEMALE POLICE Protagonist: The Birdwatcher by William Shaw #1 DS Alexandra Cupidi

It would take a lot for me to continue in a police procedural series and, even though I thought Cupidi was well-drawn and absolutely believable, this didn’t have it. The plot had just a few too many coincidences. 3½ stars

IMMIGRANT Main Character: Barnacle Love by Anthony de Sa

Five years ago, I found de Sa’s first book Kicking the Sky to be “heartbreaking and very human”, and I really wanted to like Barnacle Love as much. I just didn’t.

Like Carlucci’s Fort Fierce, this is a book of linked short stories, telling in chronological order the story of a Portuguese fisherman washed up in a storm on the shores of rural Newfoundland in the 1950s. Eventually, the family gets to Toronto, where the kids ride their bikes in the alley, as they did in Kicking the Sky.

De Sa, who is second generation Portuguese seems to draw heavily on his own family and their experience. 3½ stars

 
Title contains “THING”: Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry

3½ stars

 
Book has an OCTOBER CONNECTION: Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins-Reid

(October 13th is National No Bra Day. Really.)
Enough said?
3½ stars

 
CITY, TOWN, VILLAGE etc. in title: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Oh – I’ve been wanting to read this for years, and now I can add it to Nonfiction November.

You all probably know that it’s about the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair AND about the completely mad serial killer H.H. Holmes and his World’s Fair hotel. It was riveting.

And I was so surprised to learn that the first Ferris wheel was steam-powered (duh) AND had whole rail cars where today we have one seat.

Also: I thought the “White City” was Chicago but it actually was a term applied to the main portion of the World’s Fair. 4½ stars

I may have made a mistake in how I entered this and might not even qualify – but it was fun anyway. Does anything look interesting to you?

P.S. Some of the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.