A Forty Year Kiss

Book 55 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from July 17 - 24

A Forty Year Kiss by Nickolas Butler

published 2025

Summary (via the book jacket)

Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn't quite die. When Charlie returns to Wisconsin forty years later, he's not sure what he'll find. He is sure of one thing - he must try to reconnect with Vivian to pick up the broken pieces of their past. But forty years is a long time. It's forty years of other relationships, forty years of building new lives, and forty years of long-held regrets, mistakes, and painful secrets.

My Opinion

3 stars

I attended a reading and got my book signed by the author in Ames, Iowa earlier this year.  The book itself is really pretty with the pink/purple gradient along the outside of the pages.

This is the second book I've read by this author (Shotgun Lovesongs was a 5 star read for me) and I really like his writing style and character development.  The main reason I gave it 3 stars is because the major surprise of the book is a pretty big thing and I can't believe there wasn't at least a moment of discomfort between the characters after the discovery.

The Undertaker's Daughter

 Book 54 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from July 17 - 21

The Undertaker's Daughter by Kate Mayfield

published 2015

Summary (via Goodreads)

After Kate Mayfield was born, she was taken directly to a funeral home. Her father was an undertaker, and for thirteen years the family resided in a place nearly synonymous with death. A place where the living and the dead entered their house like a vapor. The place where Kate would spend the entirety of her childhood. In a memoir that reads like a Harper Lee novel, Mayfield draws the reader into a world of Southern mystique and ghosts.

Kate's father set up shop in a small town where he was one of two white morticians during the turbulent 1960s. Jubilee, Kentucky, was a segregated, god-fearing community where no one kept secrets, except the ones they were buried with. By opening a funeral home, Kate's father also opened the door to family feuds, fetishes, and victims of accidents, murder, and suicide. The family saw it all. They also saw the quiet ruin of Kate's father, who hid alcoholism and infidelity behind a cool, charismatic exterior. As Mayfield grows from trusting child to rebellious teen, she begins to find the enforced hush of the funeral home oppressive, and longs for the day she can escape the confines of her small town.

My Opinion

4 stars

This was a high 4 for me.  The author's writing pulled me in effortlessly.  It almost read like a fiction story because of the characters in town and the author's unique lived experiences.

The author's rough descriptions of her sister Evelyn from the very beginning caught me off guard and even though their fractured relationship was explained later, I still think the comments specifically about her appearance and laziness felt out of place. 

A Grandmother Begins the Story

 Book 53 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from July 4 - 17

A Grandmother Begins the Story

by Michelle Porter

published 2023

Summary (via the book jacket)

Carter is a young mother on a quest to find the true meaning of her heritage, which she only learned of in her teens. Allie is trying to make up for those lost years with her first-born and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother. Lucie wants the granddaughter she've never met to help her get to her ancestors in the afterlife. And Genevieve is determined to conquer her demons - before the fire inside burns her up - with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without. Meanwhile, Mame, in the afterlife, knows that all their stories began with her; she must find a way to cut herself from the last threads that keep her tethered to the living, just as they must find their own paths forward. And a young bison wants to understand why he keeps being over and whether he should make a break for it and run for his life.

My Opinion

4 stars

This book caught my eye at a bookstore.  I didn't buy it but noted the title to check out from the library.  I very rarely buy new books and am trying to reduce my buying in general so this is a fairly regular thing for me to do.

The length of time between the date I started and the date I finished isn't a true reflection of how I read this.  I started it, realized I needed to be in a focused mindset to continue, had that time yesterday, and finished it in one sitting.  Even with the gap in between I didn't struggle with the multiple viewpoints which is amazing because there was a lot of switching.  There were multiple characters, human and animal and even grass.

I'm sure there were things I didn't catch on a deeper level but I enjoyed the journey.  I didn't want to book to be longer but I did continue thinking about the characters after I finished.

Box Office Poison

 Book 52 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from July 6 - 15

Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops

by Tim Robey

published 2024

My Opinion

2 stars

I checked this out from the library after seeing it in Bookpage.  

Although there were some interesting tidbits here and there, the majority of the book read like a book report of stats.  There were also multiple footnotes per page, sometimes even per sentence, and it really interrupted the flow.  Most of the footnotes could've been incorporated into the text with a little more effort in the structure and some of the footnotes should've been left out completely and included in the index.  For just one example, the movie Meet Joe Black was referenced in passing in 2 different chapters and there was a footnote both times; one footnote was "see also p. 172" and the other was "see also p. 209".  That isn't necessary; either the reader will remember the connection or they won't, it really didn't matter (and if the author felt like it did, explain why and make the connection in the actual text, not by a footnote that says nothing other than the movie is mentioned more than once).

Lorne

 Book 51 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from May 4 - July 6

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live

by Susan Morrison

published 2025

My Opinion

3 stars

The lore and longevity of Saturday Night Live is one of my niche topics of interest and the book Live From New York by James Andres Miller and Tom Shales is one of my favorite "behind-the-scenes" books.  So when I saw this book while browsing at the library I immediately grabbed it, thinking I would love it.  I didn't love it.

Issue 1 (personally mine): turns out I'm not as interested in the man behind SNL as I am in the show itself.  

Issue 2 (not personally mine): now that I've read 644 pages, I'm still not sure I can say much about Lorne Michaels other than what was already known.  There was dishy information in the book which made me feel like the author had access but upon reflection, the dishy information was always about other people, and was usually given by someone in Lorne's orbit, not he himself saying it.  So it felt deceptively "real" when it was mostly superficial.

It was interesting but not overly informative.