This book was absolutely hysterical! It’s done as a compilation of short stories, from the man’s point of view, about being a man. For Example, the first story is about the God Dionysus who has lost his immortality and is now 50 years old and who was previously in charge of wine and orgies, but because of his age is now only in charge of wine. If you want something to make you laugh out loud, this is it!

While a simple and straight forward read, it almost seemed like this should have been a book for children. It is the story of a young Nigerian boy who learns the important lessons of life as he ignores the advice of adults and falls in with other students who lead him astray.

Guess who Mary Russell marries? Go on, guess! Nope, she marries Sherlock Holmes! And what a wonderful job this author does telling this tale. She crafts, for us, the background story of Mary, while keeping the personality of Holmes aligned during what would be an unlikely event for him. What a wonderful read!

This is a good old fashioned detective story where women were “dames” and were “notin but trouble”. The language is fun and the central character is the grounding influence here as everyone else in the story is either crazy or a killer…..and one is both.

This translated book from Japanese was very interesting. A boy of high school age who works in his family’s bookstore has just lost his grandfather who he lived with. He shuts himself away in the bookstore until a strange visitor comes into the shop. I liked the different writing this book presented as well as the way it presents a different way of looking a books.

This is an interesting look at friendship and how It both changes and endures over time. It’s also an examination of how friends enrich each other’s lives, even in the face of conflict. I love how the starting point of the book is when the 2 women are young and how they reunited after many years. A good read for everyone.

This is a wonderful tale that everyone can relate to; the anxiety and anticipation surrounding a high school reunion, and Smith tells a wonderful tale here. And as the old classmates gather, grudges come to the surface, and secrets behind them are revealed.

For those of us who read a lot of mysteries, after a while, you can often see the ending coming. Not in this one! The central character’s alibi appears to be that she is just too dumb to organize and commit this crime. And it turns out what she did do really ends up confusing the police. A good whodunit.

This was an interesting look at Russian life set in the early 1900’s. Though one sister is unhappily married, another will marry a man she does not love just to be married, one sister is in college and worried about the future, and a brother who is gambling away their home, they all share the belief that life would be better in the city than in the country and there is a circulating feeling that life may be, should be better in the future. A good read.

The trouble I had with this book is that I did it as an audiobook. There were just too many characters, and sometimes the characters were referred to differently depending upon who was speaking about them. Add to that the challenges of the language of 1826 and I was not able to enjoy the book or really follow what was going on.