FOL-Kailua purchase. On someone's wishlist.

Having a hard time getting into this. Since there seem to be a lot of copies at the used book shops, I will pass this copy along because it will be easy enough to get another should I want to try again.

Reserved for pinklady60, who has kindly agreed to a trade for 52 Loaves. Mailed 10/03/14.

Thank you so much for sending this book from my wishlist, which I heard about on both the Bookcrossing forums and and at book club.

hardback with dust cover

A man walks for 87 days to save the life of an old friend, and along the way he reflects on his life. Although it started slowly, this book turned out to be one of my favorites of the year.

An ALA Notable Book

I'm sending this RABCK to MmeClinton, who had it on her wish list. Enjoy!

Just received this....yet another fine hardcover!!!-- and much appreciate the positive review pinklady 60~~ retirement beckoning on June 16, scary but then....more time to read!! Thank you, as always, for thinking of me!!

Perhaps it is just the busy harried season, but I found myself wavering during the reading of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (by Rachel Joyce). I had been looking forward to an uplifting swift read after finally finishing the last two books which had been for book groups (both very good, but not ones I chose myself). At first, it felt like an English version of A Man Called Ove, with a main character a somewhat lonely bewildered older man, but that impression didn't last long. Harold and his wife Maureen have spent twenty years living in the same house without any real communication. Why this is so reveals itself bit by bit over the course of the story. Harold receives a short letter from a woman named Queenie Hennessey in which she tells him she is dying of cancer 600 miles away, in Berwick-on-Trent. He composes a short and most unsatisfying note back, but once he reaches the first letter box, he decides to walk the entire distance to deliver his message in person to someone who long ago "saved" him. He is unfit physically, not appropriately dressed... but off he goes. What seems early on a rather quixotic venture morphs into a pilgrimage of the mind and spirit, and it is as much Maureen's tale as Harold's. Even though I had suspected one of the revelations which came late in the book, Rachel Joyce by the end has turned this ordinary, hurting man facing his old age into a fully-fledged man you want to embrace. He meets many extraordinary people (whom you would not expect to be so... because we seldom have the time or chance to discover people beyond a fleeting encounter), and in spite of the intrusion of some less admirable types, all in all it is a love song to accepting the beauty and fragility of being alive. Or at least I felt it was. "The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human."

on the bench near the entrances....

My husband and I had just finished lunch at a lovely Maine restaurant, where my husband and I sat looking out the windows at the snow covered beautiful trees. When we walked out, we noticed several books on a bench outside with a sticker saying "Free." I thought it nicely odd that I had just finished reading The Music Shop, also by Rachel Joyce! I was delighted to find The Unlikely Pilgrimage and plan to start it as soon as I finish The Girl in the Blue Coat.