Books On My Reading List This Week – February 1, 2022
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Another week, another ambitious reading list. I’m making excellent progress on my reading goals and finally making progress on my ‘Want to Read’ list. So far, I’ve crossed twenty-five titles off my list putting me one third of the way to my goal of seventy-five books for 2022. My ‘Want to Read’ list has gone from eighty-five titles to sixty-five.
Last week, I managed to add on an additional title, The Editor by Steven Rowley. I have to confess, I was completely ignorant of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ career as an editor. Another remarkable, intelligent woman remembered by history because she was pretty. Steven Rowley’s book is wonderfully entertaining. I laughed; I cried. It is everything a novel should be.
This week, I’m looking forward to Wolf Catcher by Anne Montgomery. This
story focuses on the discovery of an ancient tomb of a Magician in Arizona.
In keeping with the theme of my recent article on feminism in Jewish literature, I’m finally getting around to reading Judith Plaskow’s book Standing Again at Sinai, which explores the Jewish faith through a feminist lens. Given we are at the point, in the book of Exodus, where the children of Israel receive the law while encamped at Mt Sinai, this seemed as good a time as any to pick up this title. Also on my list for spiritual enrichment this week, Einstein and the Rabbi by Naomi Levy. Rabbi Levy focuses on the Zohar’s teachings surrounding the soul and the many paths one can take to discovering their soul’s purpose. This is a bit of a departure from my typical choice of study. I’m more a student of the ancient commentators, Spinoza, Maimonides. I don’t have an easy time connecting with kabbalah so this is a chance to expand my horizons and get out of my comfort zone.
The rest of my reading list includes audiobooks: The Three Beths, The Bear and the Nightiningale, Leave No Trace, and, Eye of the Needle. A mix of mystery, suspense, and a bit of fantasy.
Join the conversation! Tell me your thoughts on any of your favorites on this week’s list in the comments.
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A reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician and discovers that black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.
In 1939, archaeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate beadwork, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine-hundred years earlier, was a magician.
Former television journalist Kate Butler hangs on to her investigative reporting career by writing freelance magazine articles. Her research on The Magician shows he bore some European facial characteristics and physical qualities that made him different from the people who buried him. Her quest to discover The Magician’s origin carries her back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano and into the present-day dangers of archaeological looting where black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.
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Einstein and the Rabbi is an inspiring and deeply affecting book for people of all faiths, Rabbi Naomi Levy sets off on a three-year exploration of the mystery behind a moving and mystical letter that Albert Einstein wrote to a grieving father about the unity that underlies all existence. In the letter Einstein perfectly captures what Rabbi Levy has come to believe about the human condition: that we are intimately connected and that we are blind to this truth. Wondering what had elicited such spiritual wisdom from a man of science, Levy leads us on a breathtaking journey full of wisdom, empathy, and humor, all the while helping us to reclaim our souls and glimpse the oneness that has been eluding us, live up to our gifts, and understand why we are here.
My mom would never leave me. This has been Mariah Dunning’s motto. Her compass. Her belief. So when she glimpses her mother–who’s been missing for the past year–on the other side of a crowded food court, Mariah’s conviction becomes stronger than ever. Or is she losing her mind?
An unlikely coincidence? When Beth Dunning disappeared without a trace, suspicion for her murder-despite the lack of a body or any physical evidence-immediately fell upon Mariah’s father. Until Mariah stumbles upon two other recent disappearances from Lakehaven. And all three women had the same name: Beth.
Or a sinister connection? Mariah would give anything to find out what happened to her mother, and clear her father’s name. But the truth may be more devastating than she could have imagined…
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Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil.
Then Vasya’s widowed father brings home a new wife from Moscow. Fiercely devout, Vasya’s stepmother forbids her family from honoring their household spirits, but Vasya fears what this may bring. And indeed, misfortune begins to stalk the village.
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But Vasya’s stepmother only grows harsher, determined to remake the village to her liking and to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for marriage or a convent. As the village’s defenses weaken and evil from the forest creeps nearer, Vasilisa must call upon dangerous gifts she has long concealed—to protect her family from a threat sprung to life from her nurse’s most frightening tales.
There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years ago, a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned.
Search teams found their campsite ravaged by what looked like a bear. They were presumed dead until a decade later…the son reappears. Discovered while ransacking an outfitter store, he is violent and uncommunicative and is sent to a psychiatric facility. Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with the high-profile patient. No matter how hard she tries, he refuses to answer questions about his father or the last ten years of his life.
But Maya, who was abandoned by her own mother, has secrets, too. And as she’s drawn closer to this enigmatic boy who is no longer a boy, she’ll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world.
With breathless pacing and edge-of-your-seat twists and turns, “Leave No Trace is as thrilling as whitewater rapids and as dark as the Minnesotan wilderness itself” (Amy Gentry, internationally bestselling author of Good as Gone).
His code name was “The Needle.” He was a German aristocrat of extraordinary intelligence—a master spy with a legacy of violence in his blood, and the object of the most desperate manhunt in history. . . .
But his fate lay in the hands of a young and vulnerable English woman, whose loyalty, if swayed, would assure his freedom—and win the war for the Nazis. . . .
A feminist critique of Judaism as a patriarchal tradition and an exploration of the increasing involvement of women in naming and shaping Jewish tradition.
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