That book you make sure to return to the library as soon as you finish it so that someone else can have the joy of reading it ASAP.

Pioneer Girl is Laura Ingalls Wilder's original autobiographical manuscript, published by the SD Historical Society a couple years ago (and on library waiting lists ever since). With all the annotations and photos, it weighs in at 400 pages, but I found them all mesmerizing. I loved her biographical novels as a child, but loved even more being able to 'read between the lines' from her adult perspective.

This is one of the sweetest and most poignant books I've ever read. I devoured it this weekend and then wanted to start over and read it again. A simple story with great depth.

There were days when he wasn't aware of himself, or his walking, or the land. He wasn't thinking about anything... He simply was... All the time the ball of his foot pushed his heel from the ground, and weight shifted from one leg to the other, this was everything.

He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him w/ wonder and tenderness and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting 1 foot in front of the other; and the life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time.

The stretch between Tiverton and Taunton had been full of anger and pain. He had wanted more than he could physically give, and so his walk had become a battle against himself, and he had failed.

This is the kind of book you can - and want to - read in a day, which I did. A Sheldon Cooper-esque character looks for romance and you're simultaneously cheering for him and watching a trainwreck.

I really wanted to like this book because it's Franzen and it's set in the Bay Area, but at this point in my life, I just need chapters. And less millennial angst. Reading about a lost twenty-something - in loops because I could never figure out where I'd left off - wasn't working for me.

I read this for book club. I like the premise of the forty rooms, the various spaces a person will inhabit in their lifetime physically and spiritually, but as the book went along I liked the main character less and less. She didn't know who she was, ever, so I didn't either.