20 titles, totaling 7,236 pages. Shown below in order from smallest to largest. Scroll down for the reviews.

Rules of Civility and Table for Two are both worth reading, in that order. The first follows a year in the life of a young Katey Kontent as she navigates New York City in 1938, and the lives she meets along the way.

Table for Two is split in two parts. The first is an unrelated grouping of short stories, brief yet impactful. The second is a novella, telling the story of what happens to Eve Ross (from the first book) after she boards her train away from NYC.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – It is set admist the nostalgia of 1980’s computer games, but you don’t have to be a video game geek to follow Sam and Sadie’s love story.

Demon Copperhead – This should be in everyone’s “To Be Read” pile.  Kingsolver writes the modern day Appalachian version of Dickens’ David Copperfield. It’s deep, and worth your time. It was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize.

I didn’t intend this, but I ended up reading a lot of historical fictions, dramatizations, and biographies.

The Only Woman in the Room is a dramatization of the life of Hedy Lamarr. It follows her upbringing in Vienna, her life as a performer, subsequent marriage and adjacency to the Nazi Party, how she fled to America and ended up inventing frequency-hopping spectrums. (Yes, she really did).  

The Chaperone is the story of how two women’s lives drastically change as they travel from Kansas City to New York City for a summer, and then back home. Its setting between the end of the Victorian Era and start of the progressive waves of the 1900’s explores how the country shifted (and didn’t).

The Last Days of Night  is a dramatization of the battle between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison over the patent of the light bulb, and the future of light in America, and ultimately, how nobody won.

The Ghosts of Eden Park tells the story of George Remus, who quit being a lawyer to bootleg whiskey in prohibition. He grows to the king of the bootleggers, loses everything, and it’s all wrapped up in a murder. Karen Abbott does a great job of never revealing whether Remus was a good guy or a bad guy.

The Christie Affair  was a fun interpretation of what happened to Agatha Christie in the 11 days she vanished in 1926. You don’t have to be a fan of her work to enjoy this one.

Desert Queen chronicles the life of Gertrude Bell and her life-long love affair with the Middle East. It draws heavily on her first-person writings and accounts of her contemporaries, but too often I found it reading like a wikipedia page biography rather than an introspection into a fascinating character.

I started the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is amazing fiction in a post-apocalyptic video game setting.  It’s the book(s) that Ready Player One should have been 10 years ago. It follows the main characters, a coast guard veteran named Carl, and a snarky tortoiseshell Persian Cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. The rest of the books retain that level of absurdity and humor.

Conclave was amazing, a very ‘Dan Brown’ style thriller surrounding the election of a new pope. 

There are 3 Formula 1 books in the pile that were good if you know the people and the sport, skip them if you don’t have an interest. Bernie Collins was a powertrain engineer for McLaren, and later a race strategist for Force India (and its subsequent rebrand as Aston Martin). If you want to really know the details of what goes on in winning a Formual 1 race, How to Win a Grand Prix is a good read.

Guenther Steiner became a major personality inside Formula 1 after being featured on the Netflix Drive to Survive series. The two books, Unfiltered and Surviving to Drive tell the story of his rise through rally racing, NASCAR, and then starting up the Hass Formula 1 team, and subsequent firing from Haas.

A couple of classics landed on the list, and it’s fun to revisit some old friends. I hadn’t read The Great Gatsby since High School, and took a lot more out of it as an adult. I suggest you go back and re-read some of those things you haven’t touched in 30 years.

I have seen the movie a thousand times, but finally took the time to read the book of The Hunt For Red October. I enjoyed it immensely. I can see immediately why the story was condensed for film, but the book gives so much more depth to each part of the story.

The Happiest Man on Earth was a recommendation from another book club. It is the autobiography of Eddie Jaku, a holocaust survivor. A short and inspiring read.

The Mummy, or Ramses The Damned is an Anne Rice classic, and one I enjoyed tremendously. I’ve never been big on the Horror genre in print or in film, so it was a nice stretch to get into this story. I had fun reading this, and made a note to start my way through the Lestat stories.