Dear Reader

Dear Reader Column - July 9, 2024

Dear Reader,

It's a Classics day!

Today you can sample this month's Penguin Classic and enter the drawing to win your own copy. This month's Penguin Classic is The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing 25th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Melissa Bank, Foreword by Nick Hornby.

Start reading (below) and enter for your chance to win. 

(From the Publisher:)

The New York Times bestselling classic of a young woman's journey in work, love, and life… 

Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. Soon Jane is swept off her feet by an older man and into a Fitzgeraldesque whirl of cocktail parties, country houses, and rules that were made to be broken, but comes to realize that it's a world where the stakes are much too high for comfort. With an unforgettable comic touch, Bank skillfully teases out universal issues, puts a clever new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it's like to come of age as a young woman.

Start reading this month’s Penguin Classic and enter to win your own copy.

 

Today I'm sharing one of my favorite columns…

Four years ago a hungry, tuckered-out, feral, orange tabby showed up on my porch. He was a feisty little guy but with good reason. Somewhere along the way folks had let him down. The pain and mistreatment he'd suffered, I could see it in his eyes. He kept his distance, but soon…

To read the rest of today's heartfelt Goldie column and to see photos, go to: https://www.dearreader.com/goldie/

Thanks for reading with me. It’s so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - June 25, 2024

Dear Reader,

Please welcome to the book club New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Shelley Shepard Gray. She published over a hundred books with over two million books in print, and translated into more than a dozen languages.  Shelley currently lives in northern Ohio, walks her dogs, bakes too much and writes full time.

Her new book is A is for Amish the launch of a new series. In this first installment, a brother and sister in their twenties contemplate leaving their very modern lives for a simpler one. They decide to move in with their Amish grandparents for a year, expecting to either become Amish or hurry home to their regular lives. What they don't expect, is to learn a bit about themselves, love, and faith.

Enter Shelly's drawing for a chance to win one of five copies of A is for Amish. Email: [email protected]

7:30 A.M.

For the last year, for 15 months to be exact, I've been out walking at 7:30 in the morning. This is kind of a big deal for me. Not because it's early-I know it's not. But because about ten years ago, when my husband and I became empty nesters, I decided that my mornings would involve a fluffy robe, a hot cup of coffee, and the couch. My daughter had been on the swim team for years. That meant I had gotten up with her at 4:30 so she could practice before school. Sitting around in pajamas and a robe had been a long-awaited luxury.

And then, a little over a year ago, we adopted Sophie. Sophie is a very blonde, very sweet dog. We *think* she's half-beagle and half-lab. My husband and I took our little dachshund to a parking lot a couple of towns over to meet some dogs from a nearby shelter. We'd recently lost my beloved beagle Eddie and I was desperate for a doggy companion again. Anyway, we drove to the site, fully intending to get ‘Alvin', a goofy, adorable one year old beagle mix. And then I saw Sophie.

Sophie was three and she'd recently had surgery on both of her back legs. She'd been born with a deformity and her original owner had never fixed them. A rescue organization paid to get her legs fixed.

When we saw Sophie, she was only a couple of weeks post-surgery. Sophie had no fur on the whole backside of her body, awful scars on her knees, and was as timid as you might imagine. She also has the sweetest brown eyes and I knew that we had to have her.

By the time we lived with Sophie one week, I knew a couple of things for sure. I already loved this dog--and she had her own way of doing things. She liked to put herself to bed at 9:00 at night. She also didn't want to sleep in our bedroom, she liked to be by herself in the laundry room. But most of all, she loved to go on a walk at 7:30 in the morning. Rain or shine. And, because we live in northern Ohio, that also meant in the snow. Or when it was below zero.

We've adopted a lot of dogs. I love giving them homes. But with each adoptee, I've learned that each one comes with its own set of baggage. They might be scared of one thing or love something unusual. 

I've learned that it's best to adjust to these quirks instead of trying to change them. I've always figured these dogs have already had to adjust to enough. But even after all of those adjustments and all the dogs we've had (Sophie is #6), we've never had an animal who loved a schedule more than me. Until Sophie. I guess it was time.

That's why, this morning, when my alarm went off at 7, I rolled out of bed, bypassed my robe, and turned on the coffee maker. I put on a pair of sweats, a pair of tennis shoes and, at 7:20, I opened the laundry room door. There was Sophie, sitting quietly with an expectant look on her face. "Ready to walk?" I asked. Her answer was to stand up, stretch, and walk to the front door. As I put on her leash, I couldn't help but notice that her fur is silky and soft. She walks just fine now and with no pain. And as we start on our way, a leash in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, I decided that I wasn't missing my lazy mornings much at all. Over the past year, this morning walk had become something I looked forward to.

Like my four year old dog Sophie, I had adapted to life once again.

-- Shelley Shepard Gray

Enter the drawing for a chance to win one of five copies of A is for Amish. Email: [email protected]

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - June 18, 2024

Dear Reader,

Please welcome today's guest author, Bob Hostetler. He is an award-winning writer whose more than fifty books include the new children's book, I Dream a Dream for You. He lives in Nevada.

With its sweet bedtime rhymes, I Dream a Dream for You is a charming read-aloud bedtime book for toddlers. A family of red pandas make their home in the forest. When it's time for bed, Mom and Dad tuck in their three kiddos, and as they all drift to sleep, dreams come to life through the vibrant pictures and story.

Reach out to Bob for a chance to win one of five copies of I Dream a Dream for You. Email: [email protected]

The Beauty of (Physical) Books

Ebooks are great. I read, on average, twenty-five or more ebooks every year. They're convenient, especially when traveling. They don't take up precious shelf space. They don't have to be dusted.

I don't feel guilty when I read an ebook, but I purposefully choose physical books for the majority of my reading, for numerous reasons. Reading a physical book provides a more sensory experience. Touch, smell, weight, all contribute to the pleasure. Studies suggest that those who read a physical book recall and retain the material better. Some find that reading a physical book causes less eye strain and/or headaches than reading from a screen.

But here's something I've realized only recently, and it relates to the legacy I want to leave my kids and grandkids. We all know that children imitate their older family members--parents, especially, but also grandparents, aunts and uncles, and older siblings. They talk like them, walk like them, play "mommy and daddy," "mowing the lawn," and "doing the dishes."

However, when you use a tablet or an e-reader, your kids or grandkids can't see you reading. They don't necessarily know you're reading a book. From their perspective, unless they're looking over your shoulder, you may be reading Facebook or playing a game. You might be watching a movie or YouTube video. You could be checking a text or email message.

But when you hold a physical book in your hands, it says something to a child or young person who may--even casually--notice. When your youngsters see you curled up in your favorite chair with an absorbing book, laughing with James Thurber, pondering C. S. Lewis, and crying with Nicholas Sparks, it communicates, "This is something people do." It says, "Books are interesting," "Reading is fun," and "This is a great way to use your time." And reading a physical book to or with a child (or letting children read to you!) is one of the most pleasurable experiences our world has to offer, even (or especially) in the age of ebooks, video games, and the internet.

It may seem like a small thing, and maybe it is. And I have no plans to abandon ebooks, by any means. But children live the values they learn from parents and others. Maybe they will value books and reading more if they're given the opportunity to observe the appeal of a good book in the material world.

-- Bob Hostetler

Reach out to Bob for a chance to win one of five copies of I Dream a Dream for You. Email: [email protected]

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - June 11, 2024

Dear Reader,

A Colorado author and essayist, Patricia Raybon writes daring and exciting novels at the intersection of faith and race, and she's this week's guest author.

Patricia's devotional writing appears in 'Our Daily Bread,' where she's a regular contributor. She also authors the Annalee Spain Mysteries, a "history mystery" series featuring a young Black theologian who solves crime during Colorado's dangerous 1920s Klan years. She has won both the Christy Award and the Christianity Today Book of the Year award for her fiction. A former newspaper journalist and journalism faculty member at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Patricia and her husband, Dan, a retired educator, have two grown daughters.

Patricia's latest book in the Annalee Spain series is Truth Be Told: On a lovely June night in 1924, amateur detective Annalee Spain is mingling bravely at a high-class political fundraiser in the lush backyard garden of famed political fixer, Cooper Coates, one of the wealthiest men in Denver's Black neighborhood of Five Points. When Coates's young daughter discovers a pretty stranger dead in her father's garden shed, Annalee is thrust onto the baffling new case just as she's reeling from another recent discovery-a handwritten letter, found buried in her own garden, that reveals the identity of her mother.

Meet Patricia at: patriciaraybon.com and contact her via: https://www.patriciaraybon.com/contact/

Please welcome back to the book club author Patricia Raybon…

On Staying Planted

They bounce. A little showy perhaps, but never too much. Our lilac bushes, after this winter, sported their bumper harvest with grace–waving at the wind with their fragrant, lovely branches. The flowers were so lush and sweet-smelling they seemed too grand for our humble Colorado backyard.

I grabbed my phone and took a video. Friends and family loved it.

The bigger news, however, wasn't our lilacs' beauty. It was their backstory.

Or, can you say lawn guy? A man with an ax? We'd only known him a year, far less than the 27 years since we'd planted the lilacs--by faith, of course. Lilac plantings are little more than sticks. Five little sticks, in our case. Sad-looking twigs, they offer only straggly roots as promise of the greenery that, at some point, might grow.

Indeed, I'd never grown lilacs. I just fondly recalled them from childhood. Every Denver yard seemed to ripple with lilac clusters. Lilacs adore full sun, and Colorado gets oodles of it. Walking to school with neighborhood pals, I'd tempt fate--and grouchy homeowners--by running across yards with daring friends to plant my face in lilac blossoms, breathing in the luscious scent.

Now a grownup myself, looking to landscape a small yard with my husband, I'd walked into a garden center and saw "lilacs." Yep, those sticks. Dan and I bought five, planting them along our back fence, spaced about three feet apart.

Then we stood back and let them grow. We never fussed. Never fertilized. We pruned only once. But those lilacs thrived. By age 27, they were tall, lush, and showy. Out came my phone. Photos galore. Then came our lawn guy.

Hardworking and earnest, he offered one summer day to trim our lilacs. Sure, I said, leaving him to it. An hour later, I came out back and wilted. Our lilacs were stubs. Five sticks. "What happened!" I cried.

He waved away my worry. "They'll be fine."

They weren't. Three years went by with barely a blossom. Powdery mildew struck. Then one year they perked up. Taller. More blooms. This year they truly shone. And to think I'd considered digging them all up and tossing them out as yard trash.

But they just needed time--to rebound. And for me to trust that God isn't finished with them yet.

The same is true, I suppose, for all of us. Some years may look bare and barren. But stay planted.

A lush harvest of grace and beauty is close at hand.

-- Patricia Raybon

https://www.patriciaraybon.com/contact/

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - June 4, 2024

Dear Reader,

Please welcome today's guest author, Lisa Wingate. 

Lisa is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Before We Were Yours, which has sold more than three million copies and been translated into over forty languages worldwide. The co-author, with Judy Christie, of the nonfiction book Before and After, Wingate is an Oklahoma Book Award finalist and a Southern Book Prize winner. She was named a 2023 Distinguished Alumni of Oklahoma State University. Lisa lives with her husband in Texas and Colorado.

Her brand new book is Shelterwood...a sweeping novel inspired by the untold history of women pioneers who fought to protect children, caught in the storm of land barons hungry for power and oil wealth.

Please say "Hello" and welcome Lisa to the book club: [email protected]

 

 

Be sure to enter-to-win the Shelterwood Book Club Gift Box which includes a letter from the author, printed book club kit, bookmark, and custom sticker inspired by the novel. To enter, go to: https://www.emailbookclub.com/firstlook/shelterwood.htmlg

 

 

Years ago, I interviewed a woman who couldn't read for first two-thirds of her life. I met her as the result of a college class that had been mundane for the first seven weeks. On week eight, the instructor whisked in carrying a newspaper article about an elderly World War II veteran who'd been found in a house with no electricity, no running water, no air conditioning, and no heat other than a gas stove. Criminals had broken into the home intending a robbery, but there was nothing to steal.

The instructor told us to write a newspaper piece about someone living on the margins. Then he walked out, leaving fifty college sophomores floundering like fish in a dry lakebed.

Through a few connections, I ended up at a mission shelter interviewing a small, thin woman with sun-pleated skin and silver dreadlocks bound in a multicolored bandana. To me, she looked at least eighty, but she reckoned that she was around sixty-nine. She'd traveled to Florida on a small boat as a child. The adult who was with her--a relative she thought--had not survived the trip. When the boat came ashore, it was met by traffickers who hustled cheap labor for sugar cane farms, where the workers would remain in an endless state of indenture, always in debt for their meals and housing.

This was the childhood of the smiling woman on the stool across from me. She'd escaped the farm as a young adult by sneaking away amid the chaos and smoke when stubble was burned off the fields. Years on the run followed, as she feared being arrested for her unpaid debt.

Eventually, she ended up in a shelter program, where she did odd jobs and through their literacy initiative, learned to read.

She'd been there for several years, working and living at the shelter, by the time I met her. Every day after washing loads of dishes and mopping floors, she'd walk to the subsidized daycare next

door and read to the kids. Her eyes held the most vibrant light as she talked about the importance of those sessions. "When you can't read, all around you there are line pictures," she said. "On street signs. In restaurants. In stores. In books. Everybody else looks at the line pictures, and sees a tree, or a cat, or a sky. You can't understand how that looks like a cat or a tree. The lines make other people hear thunder, or wind, or a voice saying something. But you look at the lines, and you see nothing, hear nothing. The lines don't speak. Then you learn to read, and the lines tell you everything."

To this day, those words remain with me, not only an inspiration but an indelible testament to the power of lines that form words, and words that fill pages, and pages that create stories, and stories that build worlds.

-- Lisa Wingate

Be sure to enter-to-win the Shelterwood Book Club Gift Box which includes a letter from the author, printed book club kit, bookmark, and custom sticker inspired by the novel. To enter, go to: https://www.emailbookclub.com/firstlook/shelterwood.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - May 21, 2024

Dear Reader,

Please welcome today's guest author, Susan Elia MacNeal. 

Susan is the New York Times bestselling author of the Maggie Hope mysteries, Mother Daughter Traitor Spy and Mr. Churchill's Secretary, which is now in its 23rd printing. MacNeal won the Barry Award and an AudioFile Earphones award and has been nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, Agatha, Left Coast Crime, Dilys, ITW Thriller, and Nero awards. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and son.

Susan's new book is The Last Hope: All will be revealed in this no-holds-barred finale, the Maggie Hope series, as the intrepid spy teams up with fashion designer--and possible double agent--Coco Chanel to bring down the physicist behind Nazi Germany’s nuclear program.

Find out more at http://www.susaneliamacneal.com/

Please welcome Susan Elia MacNeal…

I'm writing this on the road, away from my home in New York City, traveling solo--one of my favorite things to do, even though I'm married and have a son (who's away at his freshman year of college!). I was lucky enough to be asked to speak to a mystery group in Portland, Oregon, one of the places long on my bucket list. On a whim, I extended my stay for a few days in Portland. I met up with friends, hiked, went to the Japanese, Rose, and Chinese gardens, ate oysters and Voodoo doughnuts (not together), and caught up with dear friends from all eras of my life.

Yesterday, instead of traveling home, I cancelled my flight and jumped on the train to Seattle.

While I do miss my husband and my cat (and my son, but that's a different piece), I'm relishing the chance to spread my wings and test myself. As a wife and a mom, I find I'm always on someone else's schedule. Traveling alone, I can choose for myself. There's also time to read, to think, to not think, to dream.

When you step out of your routine, there's a real chance for self-care. You're thrown out of your habits, negotiating and navigating new situations on your own. You learn to discern and provide for what you really need, instead of caring for everyone else. I find myself developing new ways of thinking, of looking at the world, of being capable, and with that, the reminder of the woman I am besides being a wife and mom. And, with that, a new-found confidence.

Traveling means meeting new people, strangers, of course, but also people from our past. Who are they now? And who are we now with them? There's the joy in reuniting-and there's also the view we have of our younger self. How far we've come and how different we are now. It's a new perspective I cherish.

Here in Seattle, I'm working and writing (with my trusty laptop, I'm good!), but I'm also exploring. Seeking. Searching. I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for, but I know on this trip, I'm finding it. And, when I'm ready, I'll be able to take everything home with me and share with those I love.

Thank you for reading and happy trails--

-- Susan Elia MacNeal

http://www.susaneliamacneal.com/

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - May 15, 2024

Dear Reader,

Today's guest author is Amanda Eyre Ward, The New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters (Reese's Book Club pick), The Lifeguards and her new book, Lovers and Liars.

Amanda publishes nonfiction in Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and more, and publishes original work on Audible.com. Amanda's work has been optioned for film and television and translated into fifteen languages. She lives in Austin, TX with her family.

Lovers and Liars, is about a librarian in love: Three wildly different sisters reunite for a destination wedding at an English castle in this heartfelt and rollicking novel.

Send an email to [email protected] to tell me about your writing habits, favorite books, and to enter a sweepstakes for a free copy of Lovers and Liars! I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Please welcome Amanda Eyre Ward to the book club…

Recently, I heard a writer I admire (it was Ann Patchett) talk about her treadmill desk. While walking, she said, she finds herself able to slip deeply into her work. Since three of my favorite books in the world are written by Patchett (Tom Lake, Bel Canto, and The Dutch House), I went home from hearing her speak and opened my laptop. On Craigslist, I found a used treadmill desk. I bought it.

During the pandemic, when my three children and husband were all home all the time, I took my notebook and coffee mug to a dilapidated garden shed behind our house. I was filled with joy at being alone with the shovels and weed whacker.

Later, we drywalled and painted the shed and added AC and electricity. I told my next-door neighbor, Jorjanna, that I had made a "writing cottage" in the backyard.

Jorjanna said, "What, you mean the Cat House?"

Jorjanna explained that the woman we had bought our house from over a decade ago kept fifteen cats in the shed, hence the name. This knowledge definitely took the shine off my "writing cottage," but I persevered. Sometimes, I wonder what happened to those fifteen cats.

After I bought the treadmill desk, I hired four strong guys to pick it up and wrestle it into the Cat House. I plugged it in, perched my notebooks and computer on top, and began to stride and type. I hated every minute and misspelled every word. My two mini schnauzers glared at me: if I was walking, why weren't they on their leashes exploring the sights and smells of the neighborhood?

For a few weeks, I got back in bed after my family had left for the day, and wrote well, a schnauzer snuggled on either side of me, but eventually this hunched situation made my shoulders ache. I spent a month or so at my old desk, now crammed next to the treadmill desk in my cat cottage. 

Finally, feeling squished, I tried climbing aboard the treadmill again. I put on headphones and played Billy Joel loudly. (You can take the 90's girl out of New York, but you can't take the 90's New York out of the girl.)

I walked briskly and tried to type, at first losing my place as the treadmill pulled me this way and that. But even off-kilter, I was able to hear my characters. Eventually, I forgot that I was on a treadmill. I didn't know I was walking or what I was listening to. I saw only what my character, Chloe, saw, and I wrote what she thought and smelled and tasted and when she dove into an ocean far from Austin, TX, I felt the water on my skin.

I did not wake up from my writing dream until one of the schnauzers barked so loudly I had to give her a dental chew.

It does usually take me a cup of coffee to walk long enough that my novel takes over my mind. I often spill the coffee, and my pages are filled with misspellings. But I do feel as if the treadmill enables me to submerge more deeply into my story than when I used to sit at a desk.

So most mornings, you can find me walking and working in the ol' Cat House.

The schnauzers do not approve.

-- Amanda Eyre Ward

Send an email to [email protected] to tell me about your writing habits, favorite books, and to enter a sweepstakes for a free copy of Lovers and Liars! I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - May 14, 2024

Dear Reader,

It’s time for a Penguin Classic!

Today you can sample this month's Penguin Classic and enter the drawing to win your own copy. This month's Penguin Classic is, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung. 

Start reading (below) and enter for your chance to win. 

(From the Publisher:)

The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in time: the four years of World War II during which the US government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes and imprisoned 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy.

Today I'm sharing one of the recipes my daughter-in-law's mother used to make for her when she was growing up.

My Daughter-in-Law's Favorite Old Recipe--Chicken Salad

4 cups cubed, cooked boneless chicken meat
1 bunch celery, finely diced
10 ounces, weight package, carrot shreds
6 tablespoons sweet pickle relish
2 cups frozen peas, thawed
1/2 cup Miracle Whip, or just enough to moisten
1 tablespoon dill weed
garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste
7 ounces, French Fried Shoestring Potato Sticks

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl. Enjoy.

* Start reading this month’s Penguin Classic and enter to win your own copy, go to: http://www.supportlibrary.com/bc/v.cfm?L=drclassqqxqT1AFE3F33215&c=CLASSICS

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - May 7, 2024

Dear Reader,

My star is HIP 88976. If you want to know your star, read on…

Today's Guest Author, Lisa Kaltenegger, is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell, and Associate Professor in Astronomy. Lisa is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint.

Lisa serves on the National Science Foundation's Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA's TESS Mission as well as the NIRISS instrument on James Webb Space Telescope. Named one of America's Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, and an Innovator to Watch by TIME Magazine. She appears in the IMAX 3D movie "The Search for Life in Space" and speaks frequently, including at Aspen Ideas Festival, TED Youth, World Science Festival and the Kavli Foundation lecture at the Adler Planetarium which was live-streamed to six continents.

With multiple starred reviews, Lisa's new book Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos is a riveting and timely look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos, in the quest to discover whether we are alone.

You could win one of three copies of Alien Earths. Send an email with your preferred shipping address (in case you're a winner) to: [email protected]

Please welcome Lisa Kaltenegger to the book club and find your birthday star...

Birthday Star

Did you know you have a birthday star? Yes, your star. You can spot on the sky tonight. All you need is an internet connection to find it. Let's say you are 40 years old--or this is for a friend that just turned 40. Then just type "star 40 lightyears away" in the browser. That gives you a list of stars that are 40 lightyears away from the Earth. And depending where you are--Northern or Southern Hemisphere, just add that to find one you can spot tonight on the nightsky.

Your star. It does not carry your name of course, but it is your special, personal connection to the cosmos. Because light, like a car, needs time to travel. It has a speed limit. So, depending on how far away a star is, the light you see tonight was sent out a while ago. If a star is 40 lightyears away from us, then you see it tonight like it was 40 years old. So the light you see tonight was sent out the year you were born: for me that makes it your star.

Looking up at the sky you see the history of the cosmos written in light, the past unfolding before our eyes. If light did not need time to travel, we would be blind to the past and would never be able to figure out how the cosmos started.

But space and time are interwoven, so what you see on this black tapestry is "now" only here on Earth. Other places in the cosmos will have to wait thousands of years to see what you see tonight, and yet other places have already seen what we will see in our future. To me, this makes every night special. Because only you and I and our fellow Earthlings get this "now"--only here in our specific place in the cosmos.

When I look up at night, I see an incredible black tapestry dotted with bright stars. But an understanding of the cosmos makes this picture breathtaking because the black tapestry gains depth and meaning when you grasp some of its mysteries.

Go out and look at the sky tonight. Find your star that might just shine a little bit brighter because it connects you to the amazing cosmos around us.

-- Lisa Kaltenegger

Enter-to-win one of three copies of Alien Earths. Send an email with your preferred shipping address (in case you're a winner) to: [email protected]

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 

Dear Reader Column - April 30, 2024

Dear Reader,

Please welcome Diane Kelly today's guest author who writes funny mysteries featuring feisty female leads and furry, four-footed sidekicks. Diane has authored over three dozen novels and novellas, including the Death & Taxes white-collar crime series, the Paw Enforcement K9 series, the House Flipper cozy mystery series, the Busted female motorcycle cop series, the Southern Homebrew moonshine series, and the Mountain Lodge Mysteries series.

Her brand new book is Four-Alarm Homicide, in which carpenter Whitney Whitaker remodels an old fire station into a residence that will also serve as her wedding venue, is the sixth book in her popular House Flipper series.

When not writing, Diane enjoys walking her dog, playing with her cats, and hiking in the woods in her home state of North Carolina. Learn more about Diane and her books at https://www.dianekelly.com

You could win one of three copies of Four-Alarm Homicide. Send an email with your preferred shipping address (in case you're a winner) to: [email protected]

Reach out to Diane via: https://www.dianekelly.com/contact/

Welcome to the book club Diane...

Up on the Roof

I've always loved the song Up on the Roof, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and made famous by the Drifters. The lyrics are lovely, sharing how a rooftop can be a peaceful escape from the rat race and the noise of the crowds. To paraphrase the song, a rooftop is a paradise, where one can look up at the sky and, for no charge, watch a show of stars.

Although I'm somewhat scared of heights, I nevertheless love rooftop spaces for the very reasons set forth in the song. Rooftops provide beautiful views of the sky and a refuge from the hustle and bustle happening at ground level. I'm willing to put aside my fears to enjoy these unusual vantage points.

From 2014-2016, I lived in Nashville, the city where my House Flipper series is set. Nashville is famous for country music, of course, and much of that music is enjoyed on rooftops along the South Broadway or "SoBro" honky-tonk row. One of my favorite rooftop patios is at the Acme Feed and Seed restaurant, which sits at the east end of Broadway directly across from the picturesque Cumberland River, pedestrian bridge, and Riverfront Park. The gorgeous view from the roof makes you realize why so many people choose Nashville as a vacation destination. Heading back west on Broadway, one will pass many a bar and music venue with bands playing atop their roofs, but the most legendary venue with a rooftop patio is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge. With its purple paint, the historic place is impossible to miss. I got my first taste of apple pie moonshine at Tootsie's and have been hooked on the stuff ever since.

Two of my favorite rooftops include the Fahrenheit Charlotte rooftop bar in Charlotte, North Carolina and the rooftop of the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina. The view of downtown Charlotte from Fahrenheit is spectacular, especially at night when the city is lit up. The roof of the Biltmore provides breathtaking long-range views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Pisgah National Forest. With my love of rooftops, it's no surprise that I included a rooftop patio in the fire station remodel in Four-Alarm Homicide.

Do you like rooftops? If so, what's your favorite rooftop space?

-- Diane Kelly

https://www.dianekelly.com/contact/

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Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
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