Welcome

Hi! My name is Margot. My blog is about the things I love to do. That could be what I'm reading, places we visit, my family, food, or whatever else is happening. I hope you'll stay and visit a while. Contact me by email: joyfullyretired (at) gmail (dot) com.

What I’m Reading

Gods In Alabama

Sizzle

Poems by Emily Dickinson

Read-A-Longs

Clarissa

My Book Rating System

A = Excellent in every way
B = Very good story
C  = Good/Average
D = Poor
F = So Bad I couldn't finish it

Archives

Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie created a challenge for both herself and her readers in writing this, her first “nursery rhyme” mystery. Ten strangers (eight guests and two servants) are lured in various ways to a remote island off the coast of Devon by a Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owen. There seems to be no one else on [...]

Book Review: The Body in the Library

Author: Agatha Christie Publisher: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1942 Genre: Mystery My Rating: A+ I have been faithfully reading Agatha Christie’s novels in publication order. I’ve worked my way up to the late 1930s. Then I started to get bogged down. The stories were beginning to feel dark and sad. I know this time period [...]

Award Winning Nonfiction

Regular readers of this blog know how obsessed I am with Agatha Christie’s novels. You will know how thrilled I was to get Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks by John Curran. Here’s a little bit about it: Following the death of Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable legacy was revealed. Unearthed among [...]

Celebrating Steinbeck: The Long Valley

Author: John Steinbeck Publisher: Viking, 1938 Genre: Classic Fiction Format: Hardcover Source: Public library My Rating: A+ For the last two weeks a group of bloggers, sponsored by the The Classic Circuit, has joined together to honor the writing of John Steinbeck. I’m happy to be a part of that group. Over the years I’ve [...]

Book Review: Heart of a Samurai

If you are looking for a good old-fashioned adventure story, I have the book for you: Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preus. The story is about a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy, Manjiro, who was a crew member on a fishing boat that was wrecked by a fierce storm. Five crew members survived, washed ashore on [...]