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Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy - This was it. This was the one that took me months (years?) to get through. I read a ton of classics in college (English major) and vowed to read more of them after I graduated and it was no longer required. I somehow never read anything by TH so when I saw FFtMC in one of our area's many little free libraries, I nabbed it and started reading. It was a slog. I would read a few pages, then set it down for weeks. For those who never read FFtMC--written in 1901, I believe--it's the tale of Bathsheba Everdene who inherits her uncle's farm and is determined to run it, despite being a lady of some upbringing and no farming experience. A somewhat older humble shepherd falls for her, as does the gentleman farmer tending the land next to Bathsheba's. I thought initially this was a comedy considering how Bathsheba is practically a parody of a woman but no, this is considered a classic romance. Between farming terms, British slang, phrases common to the period and the publishers assuming nobody knows stories from the Bible these days, a need arose to include both footnotes and an index/guide for every chapter; the index/guide is almost as long as the book. I didn't hate this classic but neither did I enjoy it. We're living in an age of kicka$$ heroines, so the blithering Bathsheba, with her fits of anger and hysteria (and a tendency to faint or take to her bed whenever anything goes wrong) was jarring. Yet I bet for the 1900s, she was considered a "strong" female character. I'll give this classic a B- because the other villagers did occasionally give me a laugh...after I translated what they were saying. Incidentally, it wasn't until I actually began reading this book that I knew the "crowd" was the MADDING crowd, not the MADDENING crowd <g>.

The Story Collector by Evie Woods - Not the book I meant to get from the library...in addition to my notebook of books I mean to read someday, I have a list of which of those books are actually available at my home town library instead of one of the other nearby libraries in our county system. I'm starting to suspect the library website lied to me because I can rarely find any of the books on the list. Anyways, I've been wanting to read EW's acclaimed The Lost Bookshop but instead came home with The Story Collector. TSC is about a freshly divorced woman who intends to go to her family home in Boston to heal but instead impulsively (and drunkenly and not at ALL realistically) hops on a different plane at the airport, passes out and wakes up in Ireland. Because yeah, nobody would be checking boarding passes or anything like that. Anyways, as so often happens in books, she of course somehow manages to stumble upon a darling little cottage to rent for cheap in a darling little Irish town, and of course she can survive for months with no income, and of course she falls for a local guy who, despite still grieving the loss of his wife, falls for her as well. It's actually not quite as sappy as it sounds...eventually, our heroine finds a diary of a previous tenant of the charming cottage: a local young lady who 100 years earlier was tasked to help the charming and mysterious American visitor collect stories of the region's fairies. And of course our divorcee's tale intertwines with the young Irish lady's tale because that's what authors do. B, maybe even a B+ because the folklore was interesting.

The 7 and 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Easily one of the oddest books I've ever read. Summary: Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered at the end of a family dinner party. Every day, our protagonist wakes up in a different body, one of the partygoers, and is tasked with gathering clues to solve her murder. I'm quoting another author, Sarah Pinborough, who in her praise for the book said "If Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett had ever had LSD-fueled sex, then <this book> would be the acid trip book baby". The author himself admitted his first draft read like a David Lynch movie. I had a really hard time keeping up with what was happening...a REALLY hard time. But in the end, it was an engaging murder mystery with a brilliant ending. A-.