Shawna Seed

True confession: I’m not a fan of summer. It’s hot. I don’t like hot. But it’s a great time to lounge by the pool or the lake or – let’s be honest – in the air-conditioning and lose yourself in a fun read. Here are some the books on my summer reading list: BIG SKY, by Kate Atkinson I’ve been a Kate Atkinson…

I love being your personal book gift guide. Ask me to recommend a title for your great-uncle who loves history, but not war stories, something under 300 pages? I am SO THERE. One of the reasons I’m able to do this is that I read a lot of books. (51 so far in 2018, with a few more started and abandoned.) Another reason is…

At our last update, I was looking for a library book. (I’m still looking.) Since then, I’ve read many good books and written a few reviews. I went to Omaha and got sick and then broke a rib coughing. (Seriously, that’s a thing.) My team went to the Final Four (Rock Chalk!) and lost. Sometimes, it’s someone else’s year. Fortunately, no matter what…

Because I can never have enough excuses to read books, I’m joining my sister in the Wichita Public Library reading challenge this year. The idea is to read one book from each of the challenge’s 12 categories, so participants are committing to the equivalent of a book a month. I’ve been participating in the Goodreads challenge the last few years and set my…

Killers of the Flower Moon was a book crafted, it seemed, to appeal especially to me. It featured true crime, Native American history and was set in the West. And apparently I wasn’t the only person David Grann’s tale appealed to. It racked up an impressive list of honors. Killers explores a series of deaths among members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma in…

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is a perfect companion read to Underground Railroad, the “it” book of 2016. Like Colson Whithead’s novel, it tackles slavery, but from a slightly different perspective. It’s a tale of two sisters, one enslaved and one who remains behind in Ghana. It’s beautifully written, powerful and devastating. If you haven’t read Homegoing yet, put it on your to-read list for 2018.…

The Shadow Land, by Elizabeth Kostova, is a difficult book to describe. It’s a literary thriller. It’s a history lesson about Bulgaria. It’s a timely reminder of the dangers of totalitarianism. The protagonist of the novel receives the wrong suitcase in a mixup outside a hotel and sets off in search of a man named Stoyan Lazarov. After a rather long windup, the…

Number Five on this list takes us back to the Spanish Civil War and another interest of mine, art history. During a visit to Spain this fall, we rented an apartment for a week. In a get-to-know-you chat with the landlord, I told her a bit about NOT IN TIME. She pulled a book off the shelf in the apartment and said, “You…

The 1970s were my formative years as a little news junkie, so all the weird, creepy events of that decade have a certain hold over my imagination. In 2016, I couldn’t wait to read Jeffrey Toobin’s book about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, American Heiress. This was the year I dug back into Jonestown and the People’s Temple with Jeff Guinn’s The Road to…