The Booking Through Thursday for today is:

What’s your favorite part of Booking Through Thursday? Why do you participate (or not)?

I participate because I like reading and I enjoy discussing books and reading issues with others.

I don’t participate every week, though.  Sometimes it is just due to time constraints, but sometimes I don’t participate because the question would only require an answer of one sentence or even just a few words, not enough to really bother with a blog post. I like questions that require some thought, questions where it would be interesting to discuss and gain insights from other participants. But I do understand that other readers might prefer the light, quick questions, so it is nice that the BTT varies from week to week.

The folks at 5 Minutes For Books host What’s On Your Nightstand? the fourth Tuesday of each month in which we can share about the books we have been reading and/or plan to read. You can learn more about it by clicking the link or the button.

I finished My Heart Remembers by Kim Vogel Sawyer about three siblings separated after going West on an orphan train. I probably would not have picked it up, because I have read books and seen films about the orphan trains, and they all seemed to have the same basic plot line, but this one came highly recommended by several blog friends. I did enjoy it: Kim brought in some elements I hadn’t seen before.

I also just finished Home to Harmony by Phillip Gulley. It’s in the same vein as Mayberry or Jan Karon’s Mitford series: small town, eccentric residents, heart-warming stories. It was….okay. Parts I really liked, parts touched me, but overall I didn’t like it as well as Mitford. I’m not inclined at this point to read the sequels: I have a whole shelf full of books to be read. But I might pick them up some time in the future.

I also finished Farraday Road by Ace Collins, and it is the only one I did a full-fledged book review of this month, here.

With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, my reading plans for the next month are going to be very loose, though I do always have something available to read.

I’ve just begun The Heirloom by Colleen L. Reece and Julie Reece-DeMarco, given to me by my friend, Carol. It’s been on my shelf for a while, and I just rediscovered it while reorganizing my bookshelves and saw it was set during the Thanksgiving season. It’s fairly short, so it will be perfect for this week. I’m also planning on Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus, a compilation of 22 Christmas related essays from authors varying from Augustine and Luther to Piper. I saw this recommended by a lot of people last year, but by the time I got it the Christmas season was nearly over, so I saved it for this year. I’d also like to do a Bible study called My Heart Restored by June Kimmel.

Other than that…I have plenty to choose from my TBR bookshelf: I just recently gathered most of them on one shelf, the middle, double-shelved one here. Only the front row is TBR:

The opening pages of Farraday Road by Ace Collins set the stage for mystery: a literal “dark and stormy night,” a car discovered run off the road, two bodies having been shot, one alive and one dead, and a historic bridge washed off its moorings. Lije (short for Elijah) survives but neither he nor anyone else in the town can think of any reason why he or his wife, a pillar of the community known for her generosity, would become targets. In his grief he searches for clues about what happened, sometimes teamed with a reluctant detective who thinks at first she has the suspect, sometimes doing his own investigating, which leads him to another mystery involving a piece of prime real estate his wife had purchased before her death.

I am sorry to say I was not thrilled with the book. It could have used much tighter writing, and the “mystery” seemed splintered off into too many pieces which at the end are still unconnected. Hopefully it will all come together in the sequel, Swope’s Ridge. I thought perhaps this was Mr. Collins’ first book: I was wrong. He has written more than 50 books, but most of them are non-fiction. I was disappointed that, for a book in the genre of Christian fiction, there was a four-letter word usually absent in most Christian fiction and that there was little Christianity in it beyond the charitable nature of Lije’s deceased wife and the testimony of a wrongly-accused prisoner.

If you’ve read the book, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts: perhaps I am missing something. And if you haven’t, please don’t let this review dissuade you from checking out the book if you like mysteries: most of the reviews at Amazon.com and Christianbook.com are positive.

Thanks to Zondervan for providing a copy of the book for review.

The Booking Through Thursday for today is one that I submitted:

Do you think any current author is of the same caliber as Dickens, Austen, Bronte, or any of the classic authors? If so, who, and why do you think so? If not, why not? What books from this era might be read 100 years from now?

I don’t have an answer for this one — which is one reason I asked the question. I guess one consideration is what defines a classic: what still speaks to people years later even though language, dress, mannerisms, culture, etc. has changed?

What do you think?

The Booking Through Thursday for today is:

Suggested by JM:

“Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation.

That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading.

Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?

Years ago I had a problem with self-discipline in reading, starting them only to abandon them, so I began to make myself finish any book I started (any book designed to be read through, of course — not something that was primarily reference or a “pick up and dip in” book.)

I think in our “easy entertainment” era, we can lay aside something that doesn’t “grab us” right away and miss a treasure. A lot of older books weren’t written in a style to “grab” the reader right off the bat: they laid a lot of foundation first before getting on to the story.

Also, usually any book I pick up is one I’ve checked on enough to think I am going to like it — even a recommendation from a close friend whose tastes are similar is not enough to make me go get a book without further checking into it. Since I got the book in the first place because I thought there was a good chance I would like it, I’m willing to give it a fair chance.

However, life is too short to read a bad book, and I have so many I want to get to that if a book is really doing nothing for me after a good chance, I would have no problem with laying it aside. I will lay it aside sooner if it is truly bad — morally or in its writing, etc. But if it is just boring, I tend to give it more of a chance. I don’t have an arbitrary number of chapters or pages that I go through before giving up on it, but if there comes a point when I feel I am wasting my time, it’s bye-bye, book.

There have been a few times I’ve given up on a book but tried it later and liked it. A Tale of Two Cities was like that. It took me at least three, maybe four tries before I got interested in it enough to finish, but once I did it became one of my favorite novels.

Here are the answer’s to yesterday’s Literary Meme:

1. The Princess Bride

2. Climbing by Rosalind Goforth

3. In the Arena by Isobel Kuhn

4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

1, 4, and 5 were guessed correctly. 2 and 3 were admittedly a little more obscure, but I have mentioned them on my blog before and I thought a certain segment of my readers might know or guess them.

Thanks for playing! If you do this let me know so I can come guess your answers.

I saw this at Janet’s Across the Page, who saw it at Deb on the Run — and you can trace it back from there if you’d like. I don’t know who originated it. But I thought it looked like fun.

1. Pick 5 of your favorite books.

2. Post the first sentence of each book. (If one sentence seems too short, post two or three!)

3. Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books.

I had to bypass a few favorites because a main character was in the first sentence, or, in a few biographies, the subject was named in the first sentence. And of course, A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorites but has one of the most famous opening lines ever. But here are five.

1. This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

2. The first picture can scarcely be called a memory; rather, let it be just a family legend.

3. “If you go to China, it will be over my dead body. I will never consent,” was my mother’s bitter remark.

4. In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.

5. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

In a couple of cases there is a verse or quote at the heading of the chapter, but I quoted the first line of the actual text of the book. And in one case the first line is part of the introduction, but the introduction to that book is an essential part of it.

You can leave your guesses in the comments, but you might want to try to bypass looking at the comments if you’re trying to guess.

Let me know if you do this as well. And if you want to test your knowledge of more first lines, I found a fun quiz here. I got a 90% even though I hadn’t read all of the books mentioned.

The folks at 5 Minutes For Books host What’s On Your Nightstand? the fourth Tuesday of each month in which we can share about the books we have been reading and/or plan to read. You can learn more about it by clicking the link or the button.

I finished The Missing, the second in the Seasons of Grace series by Beverly Lewis, A Surrendered Heart by Tracie Peterson and Judith Miller, the third in the Broadmoor Legacy series, and Dr. Frau: A Woman Doctor Among the Amish by Grace H. Kaiser, a non-fiction book about this doctor’s experiences among the Amish in the Lancaster, PA area for 28 years beginning in the 1950s. I enjoyed them all and posted a bit more about them here.

I also finished rereading Becoming God’s True Woman edited by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and am working on a review of it for another site. I will probably post a shorter review of it here later. I’d highly recommend it: it was excellent. Reviewed here.

I am currently reading My Heart Remembers by Kim Vogel Sawyer about three siblings separated after going West on an orphan train, and I have just barely started Home to Harmony by Phillip Gulley.

I’m not sure what will come next, but it will probably be something from my Fall Into Reading goals.