Tag / Goodreads Choice Awards

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Book 65 (of 52) – The Third Gilmore Girl

The Third Gilmore Girl – Kelly Bishop

Actress (and dancer!) Kelly Bishop has had a long a distinguished career, on the stage and screen.  In The Third Gilmore Girl, winner of the 2024 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Memoir, she tells her story, starting with her childhood in Colorado, where a love of dancing started her on her path.  Starting as a chorus dancer, she eventually worked her way up to the main cast, eventually originating the role of Sheila in A Chorus Line, a role which earned her a Tony.  She found success on the big screen, playing Jennifer Grey’s mother in Dirty Dancing, and on the small screen, with the beloved role as Emily Gilmore on Gilmore Girls.

Outside of Gilmore Girls and some of her more recent work, I was not familiar with her work or her backstory.  It sounds like she has had a wonderful and fulfilling career and has lived a full life.  I hope to experience more of her work in the future.

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Book 64 (of 52) – Great Big Beautiful Life

Great Big Beautiful Life – Emily Henry

Alice thinks she has it made, having tracked down the long-missing former tabloid princess from one of the most storied families of the 20th Century and pitched her on writing her version of her family’s scandalous past.  Instead, she finds herself in competition with Hayden, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and Purdue alum who was invited down to the remote Georgia island to pitch the job as well.  While they both work on their separate pitches, they fall in love, knowing that this job could jeopardize their personal relationship.  And when Alice finds out the big secret that the heiress has been hiding, it does just that.

For the third year in a row, the Goodreads Choice winner for Favorite Romance has found its way onto my Kindle.  Emily Henry’s latest, Great Big Beautiful Life, isn’t your traditional romance novel, or at least not what I believe a traditional romance novel to be.  Its story shares some DNA with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, where an aging protagonist looks back at her life story through her own lens while ostensibly working with a young author.  This is now the third entry from Henry that I have enjoyed, so I may need to consider looking into more of her back catalog going forward.

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Book 63 (of 52) – The Compound

The Compound – Aisling Rawle

A group of twenty young and beautiful contestants find themselves in the compound, competing in a reality show where they complete tasks, both communal and personal, to get the things they need to survive and to thrive.  As the numbers dwindle, the remaining players start to crack under the pressure, some wanting to leave and go home and some looking to go all the way.

Aisling Rawle’s debut novel, The Compound, was the winner of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Science Fiction.  Outside of some hints of taking place in a dystopian world, there isn’t much (or as much as I would have liked) in the way of science fiction.  Covering a similar ground as Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple, Rawle goes deeper into the psychology of why the contestants are participating in the show and what they hope, or had hoped at the outset, to get out of it.  This was a pretty good debut, and I look forward to more from her in the future.

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Book 33 (of 52) – The Ministry Of Time

The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley

In the near future, Britain has gained the power of time travel and brings a number of people close to their deaths in the past to the present, hoping to use them to study the effects of time travel and to see how well they can assimilate to their new time period.  Each one is assigned a bridge, a Ministry employee who lives with them and helps them adjust to the 21st century, answering questions along the way.  Things go sideways when a duo from the future try to kill one of the bridges and her charge.  Can they save themselves without disrupting the timeline?

Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time, was the winner of the 2024 Goodreads Choice award for favorite science fiction while being nominated for favorite debut novel.  It poses some interesting moral questions should time travel ever become a reasonable concern wrapped around a convincing romance between the main character and her charge, the real-life Commander Graham Gore.  I look forward to reading more from her in the future.  Or the past.

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Book 30 (of 52) – I Was A Teenage Slasher

I Was A Teenage Slasher – Stephen Graham Jones

When Texas teen Tolly Driver gets infected during a massacre at a high school party, he turns into a slasher, compelled to exact revenge on the classmates who nearly killed him.  His new powers allow him to fulfill all of the tropes of the genre, but he runs into one problem: his “final girl” turns out to be his best friend.  Can he avoid his new nature long enough to keep her alive?

I Was a Teenage Slasher, by Stephen Graham Jones, was a Goodreads Choice Awards nominee last year for favorite horror.  It certainly took a new approach to the genre, where becoming a slasher was a physical disease and not something one chose to do.  I enjoyed it, but it never sucked me all the way in.

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Book 28 (of 52) – The Identicals

The Identicals – Elin Hilderbrand

Although they are identical twins, Harper and Tabitha Frost live completely separate, though parallel, lives.  Harper, never married, lives on Marth’s Vineyard with her father, while Tabitha, also never married but a mother of a teenage daughter, lives on Nantucket with her mother.  When their father dies and their mother breaks her hip returning home from the service, they find themselves on the other’s island: Harper on Nantucket taking care of her niece and running the family business and Tabitha on the Vineyard, rehabbing their father’s house to sell.  Can they get past fourteen years of heartache, bad feelings and resentments to become family once again?

The Identicals, a 2017 Goodreads Choice Award nominee for fiction by Elin Hilderbrand, returns us to the luxurious vacation islands off the coast of Massachusetts for another intriguing beach read.  The split between the sisters is a little far-fetched, but it is still an interesting tale.  The Parent Trap-esque switch between the two islands allows each sister to slough off what everyone expects of them and rediscover who they actually are, or want to be.  The reconciliation at the end came on kind of quick, but, other than that, I can’t complain.  I look forward to continuing my dive into Hilderbrand’s caralog.

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Book 27 (of 52) – End Of Watch

End of Watch – Stephen King

Though physically incapacitated, Brady Hartsfield has developed telekinetic and mind-control abilities through experimental drugs and begins a new wave of terror by manipulating others into committing suicide, starting with the survivors of his attack at the Civic Center.  The police, unable or unwilling to do their own investigation, turn a blind eye as retired detective Bill Hodges follows the leads.  As the body count rises, Hodges, facing his own terminal diagnosis, and his partner Holly Gibney must stop Brady’s deadly influence before it is too late.

The third and final installment of Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy, End of Watch, which won the Goodreads Choice Award for favorite mystery and thriller back in 2016, brings back the cat and mouse game between Brady Hartsfield and Bill Hodges that started in Mr. Mercedes.  This was a good end for Hodges, though I can see why King decided to continue on with the Holly Gibney character.  Speaking of which, her latest adventure was just released, so I should add that to the waitlist.

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Book 21 (of 52) – Home Is Where The Bodies Are

Home Is Where The Bodies Are – Jeneva Rose

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly be drawn in to a book because of one.  Such is the case with Home Is Where the Bodies Are, the latest from Jeneva Rose about a family that reunites following the death of their mother, bringing decades old secrets back to the surface.

Nominated for a 2024 Goodreads Choice Award for favorite mystery and thriller, the book drew my interest due to its use of a video cassette tape as a cover, standing out from the crowd of nominees.  It was my first experience with the work of Jeneva Rose and I may be on the lookout for more going forward.

And with that, we draw to a close my relationship with the Chicago Public Library.  I’ve saved a lot of money over these past four years and read a lot of books I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.  Time to see if my smaller, local library can fulfill the same at a similar pace.

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Book 20 (of 52) – Blue Sisters

Blue Sisters – Coco Mellors

A year after the death of their sister, three women, a lawyer, a boxer, and a model, try to get past their grieving and start to put their lives back together.

Blue Sisters, by Coco Mellors, was a 2024 Goodreads Choice nominee for favorite fiction.  It is an interesting tale of how people are able to heal once they allow themselves to grieve and that the healing process may not always be a straight line.  I had never heard of Mellors before, so I don’t know what else, if anything, she has out there.

 

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Book 19 (of 52) – The God Of The Woods

The God Of The Woods – Liz Moore

When a teenage girl goes missing from a summer camp in the mid-1970s, it brings to mind a similar case from years earlier, one involving her brother.  While the police interview the family and the campers, they learn more about both disappearances, officially solving the earlier one while unofficially solving the second.

Winner of the 2024 Goodreads Choice Award for favorite mystery and thriller, The God of the Woods is my first experience with the work of Liz Moore.  She puts together a good mystery, interweaving the disappearance of Bear years earlier with the disappearance of Barbara.