End of the Year Wrap

It's over for the year. When we all left the book club two weeks ago now, I had a smile and felt ready for the holiday break. And when we had a relaxingly, fun session with a more than enough chocolate--again--to eat and a fun read to discuss, what's not to love?

This year has been mostly successful with good reads and I'm glad the regular book
clubbers have trusted my judgment to try some new authors (for some that is, others have read from the selected authors) and found their books worthwhile. I gathered the best received writers for the year were Charles Todd, Peter May and Chris Grabenstein. All these authors have series that some either begin to read or noted for later reading interests. For instance, we read the first of the Peter May "China Thrillers" series as our library system has those first two novels.

Two authors we finally got around to reading this year include Jack Kerley and Chris Grabenstein. With Kerley's setting of the deep-South police and Grabenstein's setting of the New Jersey amusement park laden coast, I was glad to have these two as book club targets.

And although time and opportunity didn't permit me to do as much as I wanted with the book club or blog, I'll try it all again in January... Until then, here's a "YouTube" video with author George Pelecanos reading from the book we read in March, The Night Gardener.