I read these three books during my 30 books in 30 day challenge in September.  Since they were all just okay I thought I’d group them together.

Tinkers. Finished 9-25-16, 2/5 stars, fiction, 191 pages, pub. 2009

Tinkers by Paul Harding is a Pulitzer Prize winner and I did not care for it. I was mostly bored out of my mind, with a few pages here and there that gave me a half-hearted reason to continue. If I taken another book I would not have bothered to finish it.  But at 190 pages it was an easy plane book.

Seven Spiders Sinning. Finished 9-23-12, 3 stars, young readers, 132 pages, pub. 1994

I read Seven Spider’s Spinning by Gregory Maguire Friday night after we were back to the room for the night (Boston trip).  I must have picked this up at a book sale after I read Wicked and it was a perfect, easy choice for the trip.  Seven huge, tarantula-type spiders escape and try to take out the girls at a local elementary school.  There were spiders drawn on the margins of the pages and it was creepy, but at 132 pages I wasn’t going to complain.

Discovering Ohio. Finished 9-25-16, 3 stars, travel, 95 pages, pub. 2001

I’ve had this in my unread stack for years, at least since 2008 when I started taking a yearly picture, so it’s good that I finally got around to reading it.  I think, the problem for me at least is that when you read something about a place that you know and love you are overly critical.  The pictures were great and I do like how the author tried to paint a picture of Ohio through the years, all the way back to when white settlers came here, but she made a choice not to focus on the cities which I think does a major disservice to the state.  Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland are top 50 cities in population. I know from living in Cleveland just how much history there is here.  Yes, Ohio is full of farms and mining and industrial places, but that is really only half of the picture.  Reading this I think you’d get a fairly one-sided picture of the state.