Books I Read In November

My November reading was a little slower than the previous month, but that's ok. I read some really great books - and one I ended up skimming - so it was a great stack to share with you.

I'll start with the not-so-great one. My nonprofit is run by a Board of Directors, so Creating Caring and Capable Boards sounded great. It's full of great information about reminding your Board how important being a trustee with passion and purpose is, I just wish it hadn't been so dry. A lot of what nonprofits do is mundane though necessary, so a book that puts some life into would have been nice.

My two history books this month were amazing. Washington and Hamilton by Stephen F. Knott and Tony Williams wove the two founding fathers' stories into one exciting narrative that shared more details than I'd ever known. Their working relationship, mentorship, eventual friendship, and the building and rebuilding necessary between them so they could build and rebuild a nation and government was fascinating.

Presidents by Accident by Edmund Lindop reminded me very much of Bill O'Reilly's Confronting the Presidents, where the author critiqued each presidency from the beginning. Similarly, Lindop assessed each vice president that was forced into the presidency by illness, death, or resignation. There was so much about these nine men that I was clueless about, so it was quite the page-turner.

To break up the deep, philosophical, more tedious-to-read books, I threw in a two-hour read. Their Road To Redemption by Patrice Lewis was the only Love Inspired book at the used book store last week, so I grabbed it up. It's a sweet story of two young people both battling poor choices in their past that were affecting their lives now. And I love that God Is Good is sprinkled through the entire story.

My three Grace Livingston Hill books in November were Time of the Singing Birds, Spice Box, and Astra. They were written in 1944, 1943, and 1941 respectively, and they're amazing snapshots of what contemporary life was like in the decade they were written. Knowing my grandparents were young people in the 1940s made them so interesting, thinking about them in those backdrops and towns. I still have several of Hill's books in my TBR, and I'm excited to see how they compare - some are older and some are more recent than this trio.

What was in your read pile in November? Which ones were your favorites?

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