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Gilion C. Dumas

@gilioncdumas

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Book lover. Lawyer. Portlander. Tabby mother. Rose City Reader blogger. Home of the #tbr26in26 challenge & the #europeanreadingchallenge.
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📣 2026 EUROPEAN READING CHALLENGE📣 The new year here, and that means reading challenges for those so inclined. 🎉 🗺️ The European Reading Challenge has been going strong since 2012. Please join me for the 14th edition of this Grand Tour of Europe through books! Choose your own level of commitment of 1 - 5 books to “complete” the challenge. Or read more to compete for the Jet Setter Prize for the person who visits the most countries between the covers. 🛩️ Thank you to those loyal readers who have joined in since the beginning! 🥰 A warm welcome to those joining for the first time or those coming back after some time off. THE GIST: The idea is to read books set in European countries or books by European authors. The books can be of any genre – fiction, nonfiction, novels, short stories, memoirs, travel guides, cookbooks, biography, poetry, whatever. You can participate at different levels, but each book must represent a different country — either written by an author from a different country or set in a different country, no two books from the same country. It’s supposed to be a tour! 🏷️ You can play along here on IG simply by tagging related posts #europeanreadingchallenge. Because the algorithm is so crazy, the hashtag probably won’t work to find your posts. So please, please, please tag me in the caption! That way, I will see your posts and share them in my stories. ➡️➡️ If you want to be more official about it, you can sign up on my Rose City Reader blog (link in bio). You do not have to sign up on the blog to participate, but you do have to sign up on the blog if you want to compete for the Jet Setter Prize. You can find all the official rules and guidelines on my blog. Bon voyage and happy reading! by @gilioncdumas
TBR 26 in ‘26 🎉 Join me for the TBR 26 in ’26 Challenge! 🎉 Here’s a chance to clear 26 books off your TBR shelf in 2026 and connect with your fellow booklovers. Use #TBR26in26! And tag me in your posts. (Note, #26in26 is not the hashtag for this challenge because people use #26in26 to mean reading 26 books in 2026, even new books, not TBR books. Or doing 26 other things in 2026, like movies or new restaurants.) If you participated in prior years, I hope you join us again. If this is new to you and sounds like fun, play along! ➡️➡️ You can participate here on bookstagram just by using the #TBR26in26 hashtag. However, with all the algorithm changes, I will not see your posts even with the hashtag, so please please please tag me in your posts. Then I will see them and share them in my stories. 🤗 ⭐️ If you want to be more official about it, meet other participants, or participate through your blog, sign up on the main TBR 26 in ’26 Challenge page on my Rose City Reader blog. 👉🏻Link in bio.👈🏻 You can choose all your books ahead of time, like I did. But if you are a mood reader, pick them as you go! Or mix and match. If you pick them ahead of time, you can always change your mind. This is supposed to be fun! The only hard and fast rules are no library books (there are other challenges for those) and you must have owned the book before January 1, 2026. 👁️👁️ If you want to see all the “rules and guidelines” and more details, go to the main Challenge page on my blog, which you can find at the TBR 26 in ’26 link in my linktree in bio. 🙋‍♀️ Who’s in? 🙋 #TBR26in26 bookchallenge2025 by @gilioncdumas
New year, new followers (thank you) – time to #meetthebookstagrammer! 👋🏻 Hi there! I’m Gilion (hard G), a #womanofacertainage who loves to read. I’ve been on IG since 2017 and have had my Rose City Reader book blog since 2008. I keep a master book list on LibraryThing and would be lost without it. When not reading, I practice law and hang out with my husband James (aka Sweetie, Giacomo, Jamesasaurus, or Buster) and one odd tabby cat named Billie Holiday (aka Billie Cat, Billieopterus, Booger, Cute Face, or Shitbird). As of this year, I’m officially “all but” retired, so the practicing law part will hopefully take much less time, giving me more time for James, Billie Cat, and books! I like to read literary fiction, classics, mysteries and thrillers, random memoirs, food books, travel books, miscellaneous nonfiction, and coffee table books, with just a dash of romance and hen lit on occasion. When it comes to books, my happy place is somewhere between mid-20th century #litfic and Golden Age mysteries. A few examples of favorite authors: 📚 Literary fiction: Kinglsey Amis, Kate Atkinson, Daphne Du Maurier, Graham Greene, Jim Harrison, Erica Jong, David Lodge, Iris Murdoch, Barbary Pym, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, John Updike, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Woodhouse. 📚 Classics: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, and Mark Twain. 📚 Mystery/thriller: Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, Mick Herron, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Helen MacInnes, Louise Penny, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Not surprisingly, I also like to collect books. My biggest collection is of vintage Penguin tribands, mostly the green crime fiction ones. 👉🏻 Swipe to see. I also like Soho Crime editions with the older color-block spines, NYRB Classics, cookbooks, “country house” coffee table books, and British Library Crime Classics. For fun, swipe twice to see my bookstagram #behindthescenes – Oregon winter dark, bad lighting, and messy. 😆 Enough about me! If you are new here, please drop me a comment and tell me something about your #readinghabits. by @gilioncdumas
A secret library? It’s a bookshelf crime! 🫆📚 My bookcases are double stacked and overflowing. So I hid my collection of candy colored Soho Crime books in a dresser drawer. Needs must! ✨💕 What creative solutions have you come up with to contain your books? 💬🤔 #bookwormproblems #crimefiction #bookcollection #homelibrary #bookish by @gilioncdumas
Done is better than perfect, right? 🤷🏼‍♀️ That’s certainly my thinking when it comes to @oldskoolchallengeclub’s #pumpkinpicks challenge this week. This stack of vintage Penguin books is supposed to kind of sort of look like a pumpkin. 🎃 And there are other pumpkins in there to bolster the idea. 😉 Remember the first rule of the #oldskoolchallengeclub is that we’re #HereForTheFunNotTheNumbers! I randomly grabbed these tattered books from my TBR shelf so, being entirely unread, this also counts as an #orangeyougoingtoreadthat post. 🧡🧡 Did you do an Old Skool #bookstagramchallenge this week? Which one? 💬 by @gilioncdumas
Come with me as I continue to explore my TBR shelves! ✨ I’ve been highlighting some of my unread books in a series of #tenonmytbr posts, alphabetically by author. 💕 Join me! Here are books by authors, whose names start with T. Also, a tomato 🍅 and a tractor 🚜 (with little me on it), two T items that decorate my home library shelves. Have you read any of these books or authors? ⬇️⬇️ 💃🏻 Elegance by Kathleen Tessaro. I have no idea what this is about, but I love the cover. 👑 The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, I read two of her books for Spinster September and now want to read more. I read this one years ago, but it’s time for a reread. ❄️ Snow Angels by James Thompson. This is when I admit that the T authors hide on the bottom shelf and I haven’t seen them for so long. I have no memory of them. What is this? 🤦🏼‍♀️ The Newcomes, Volume Two by William Makepeace Thackeray. I have no idea if I have Volume One. 🕰️ Never Too Late by Angela Thirkell is the 25th book in her Barsetshire series. Do I need to read them in order? If so, I have some backfilling to do! 🧝🏻‍♂️ The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. This wins the prize for being on my unread shelf the longest. My grandpa Ralph gave it to me for my birthday when I was in sixth grade. I won’t do the math for you, but I haven’t been 12 in a long time! 🍇 Murder on the Vine by Camilla Trinchieri is the third book in her Tuscan mysteries series. It looks like I also have the first book, Murder in Chianti. I’ll start with that one. 🎩 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope. When I start my Trollope binge, I’m going to start here. 🤷🏼‍♀️ Next of Kin by Joanna Trollope. She is some kind of kin to Anthony. I love her books. 🪜Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler. I’m working my way through her books. I tagged a few to play along. ✨ But if you see this and it looks like fun, please share your TBR stacks alphabetically. Get creative! Go A to Z or only pick favorite letters. If you don’t have 10 authors of any letter, use multiple books by fewer authors, go with fewer books, or combine letters. Whatever. It’s supposed to be fun! #bookchallenge #bookstagramchallenge #alphabetchallenge #rosecityreader by @gilioncdumas
I’m fascinated by what I think of as storyline serendipity ✨, where two completely unrelated books you read close in time both mention the same random thing. Like two books that reference the same historical character or involve a visit to the same unlikely place. I don’t mean obvious things like two mysteries including dead bodies, just little details. 🔎 For example, I recently read a Ruth Rendell mystery called Not in the Flesh and The Wonder Worker by Susan Howatch back to back. 📚 In both, the main characters watch the movie version of Don’t Look Now, a short story by Daphne du Maurier set in Venice. 🎬 As far as I can remember, I’ve never read any other book that mentions that movie, so it jumped out at me when both a police detective and a Church of England priest watch the same movie. I thought maybe the movie had just come out right before the books were published, so reflected popular culture at the time they were written. But the movie came out in 1973. The Rendell book was published in 2007 and even the Howatch book was published in 1997. 🕰️ It was just pure serendipity! ✨ Slide to see the Storyline Serendipity logo I made for my Rose City Reader blog quite a while ago. I’ve been keeping track of these coincidences for years. Have you come across any? 💭 #readersofig #bookishlife #alwaysreading #rosecityreader #bookblogger by @gilioncdumas
As we slide into the back half of October, I’m finally getting around to @nothing.beats.a.good.book’s scavenger hunt for this month. Another fun one! Swipe to see the covers. 🅾️ TITLE STARTING WITH O 🅾️ Off to the Side by Jim Harrison 🎀 PINK COVER (BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH) 🎀
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 🦡 ANIMAL ON THE COVER (WORLD ANIMAL DAY) 🐸
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 👁️ EYES ON THE COVER (WORLD SIGHT DAY) 👁️
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding 🕰️ BOOK SET BACK IN TIME (CLOCKS BACK IN THE UK) 🕰️
The Girl from Oto by Amy Maroney 🎃 HALLOWEEN OR ORANGE COVER 🎃
The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher 🎶 STING/POLICE SONG (STING’S 75TH BIRTHDAY) 🎶 I’ve read all these and loved them enough to keep around. Most are well known and need no description from me. But I strongly recommend one that may not be so familiar, The Girl from Oto by Amy Maroney. It’s terrific historical fiction about a woman artist in the 1500s, inspired by real life 16th century women painters. It’s a braided narrative with the present day art historian tracing the provenance of one of the woman’s paintings. Do you see any of your favorites in this list? #readersofinstagram #bookstagramchallenge #favoritebooks #rosecityreader #readerlife by @gilioncdumas
We interrupt our regularly scheduled bookish programming to bring this special alert: 🐿️ The CHIPMUNK PILGRIMS have arrived! 🐿️ Okay. Okay. I understand you are probably not as excited as I am. But these pilgrims are my favorite find from my recent girl trip to Texas. 🤠 Most people go to Round Top to find gorgeous antique furniture, fancy clothes, really high end stuff. But when I spotted these vintage critters at Brenham Antique Center, I had to have them. 💗💗 Even though I had to ship 📦 them home because they are too big for a plane. My beloved chipmunk pilgrims will be a Thanksgiving tradition in my house from here on out. 🤎🦃 #readyforthanksgiving #pilgrims #chipmunks #rosecityreader #notbooks by @gilioncdumas
Let’s continue to explore my TBR shelves! ✨ I’ve been highlighting some of my unread books in a series of #tenonmytbr posts, alphabetically by author. 💕 Join me! Here are ten books written by authors with S names. Plus a brass spigot, probably the strangest souvenir on my shelves. My grandpa Fritz brought it back from Bavaria, presumably after long use at his family’s guest house. See anything in this scattershot selection that you’ve read? 👁️👁️ 🪶 Scandalmonger by William Safire, historical fiction about a muckraking journalist and Thomas Jefferson. 
💕 A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan, her second novel and a terrific cover. 
🪷 On the Edge by Edward St. Aubyn. I loved his Patrick Melrose novels and want to read more by him. 
👦🏻 Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple. Where’d You Go, Bernadette is great, so why haven’t I read any more by her? 
⚔️ The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, historical fiction about the Civil War, won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. 
🎭 Love’s Labor’s Lost by William Shakespeare. I dream of reading all the plays straight through, which I think Andy @places_and_books did a few years back. 
🍻 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe. I was supposed to read this in college but was too hung over to finish before class. The irony. 
🚲 The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson. I loved Major Pettigrew and this sounds delightful, so it’s the first I’d pick. How about you? 
🛌 Hotel World by Ali Smith. I like her books when I read them but never remember to. Thoughts on this one? 
👴🏼 Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout. This is a Bookstagram darling and I didn’t even know it was on my shelf! I tagged a few to play along. ✨ But if you see this and it looks like fun, please share your TBR stacks alphabetically. Get creative! Go A to Z or only pick favorite letters. If you don’t have 10 authors of any letter, use multiple books by fewer authors, go with fewer books, or combine letters. Whatever. It’s supposed to be fun! #bookchallenge #bookstagramchallenge #alphabetchallenge #rosecityreader by @gilioncdumas
I was looking for a book on the Blackwell’s website recently and got distracted by some British Library Crime Classics. 👀🐿️ You know how that goes, right? A few of these authors are already on my To Be Read shelves but I haven’t read any of them. Which do you recommend? 🙋🏼‍♀️ 🔎 Thirteen Guests by J. Jefferson Farjeon 
🔍 Seven Dead by J. Jefferson Farjeon 
🔎 Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight by R. Austin Freeman 
🔍 Death of an Author by E. C. R. Lorac 
🔎 The Methods of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North 
🔍 Scarweather by Anthony Rolls 
🔎 Family Matters by Anthony Rolls As for the book I originally looked for, I don’t even remember what it was! 🤦🏼‍♀️ #bookwormproblems #crimefiction #mysterybooks #readersofinstagram #rosecityreader by @gilioncdumas
To #spellthemonthinbooks this time around, I looked for books with a bit of an autumn vibe. 🍂🧡 As always, they came from the backlist and even the “classics” aren’t household names. Are there any here you’ve read? 🙋🏼‍♀️ They are all TBR for me. O - Ordinary Thunderstorms
C - Crossroads
T - True at First Light 
O - One More River 
B - Blood Royal 
E - Everyone in Their Place
R - Rachel Ray Thanks go to these authors for titles with no “the” 😆 — William Boyd, Jonathan Franzen, Ernest Hemingway, John Galsworthy, Alexandre Dumas, Mauricio de Giovanni, and Anthony Trollope. I’m only getting around to spelling the month because I was galavanting around Fayette County, Texas with my traveling posse — my mom, my sis, and a dear friend. 🐂🤠🥂 Swipe to see a few highlights. #bookstagramchallenge #spellthemonth #womenwhotravel #readerlife by @gilioncdumas

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