It's Monday 2/8! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

How is everyone on this Monday morning? It’s very cold here, and we got more snow here this weekend, but at least the sun is shining. According to the forecast, this is the last we’ll see of sunshine for the next week!

We had a fun weekend, though I didn’t get much done. That’s OK; sometimes you need to just relax and have some fun. My health is much improved on some new treatments (and more to come), pretty much back to my “normal” baseline with chronic illness which suddenly feels–after a terrible past year–pretty darn good! So, we took a short hike on Saturday on some local trails we’d never been on before. I’m in a local Women’s Hikers group on Facebook that a friend started, and I’m amazed by all the great places to hike so close to us that we’ve never even heard of before (we’ve lived here for 30 years)! 

It was also “warm” enough (above 40 F!) to have an outdoor visit with my father-in-law, who is 95. We were all bundled up, but we had a bit of sunshine, and he so enjoys getting out and doing this. My husband sees him every day, but his dad is really getting sick of being stuck inside and not being able to come to our house. He gets his second shot next week – yay!

And, of course, we topped off our weekend with the Superbowl. If you don’t live in the U.S., you might not be aware of how big a deal this is here! Neither my husband nor I much cared who won last night, but it’s fun to get into the group celebration spirit. We made our favorite snacks for dinner, enjoyed the ads, and chatted with friends on Facebook about the whole thing. My personal favorite ads were two in the beginning for Most Entertaining–Sesame Street for DoorDash (one of my all-time favorite SS songs!) and the Scott’s one which was filled with hilarious celebrity cameos, including John Travolta doing the dance from the prom scene in Grease with his daughter (I had to rewatch it on Youtube to catch everything)–and for powerful emotion, the one with Bruce Springsteen in Kansas about meeting in the middle. The game? eh.

In fact, we turned the game off a few minutes early and went upstairs to read! Here’s what we’ve all been reading this week:

I finished and thoroughly enjoyed The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz, one of the older books on my TBR bookcase. It was published in 2007, and I’ve been wanting to read it for well over a decade! The Spellman family runs a P.I. business, with mom, dad, older sister, Izzy, and younger sister, Rae, all involved (brother David is a lawyer). The novel is written from Izzy’s point of view, with a heaping dose of humor in among the cases and investigations. Izzy has a lot of issues, though she’s no longer quite the mess she was when she was younger. Still, most of her relationships are very short-lived (for some reason, men don’t like their girlfriends to stake them out and run credit checks on them), until she meets one guy she really likes. In fact, she likes him enough that she lies to him about what she does for a living. Of course, this approach will eventually blow up in Izzy’s face, and at that point, she decides to leave Spellman Investigations, though her parents want her to work on one last case. This fun, fast-paced, witty novel was just what I needed! It’s the start of a series.

Waiting for my book group book to come in at the library, I squeezed in a very short book, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. It’s actually a play, and my first Wilde read. My husband gave it to me for Christmas. The play was described by a critic of the time (1895) as “a trivial comedy for serious people,” and that is still an apt description! It’s a silly but smart farce filled with puns, quotable lines, mistaken identities, and other fun. The basic plot is about two different men, each of whom makes up fake friends/family as an excuse to travel and escape their ordinary lives. So, John leaves his estate in the country to visit his pretend wild brother named Earnest who lives in London (and then pretends to be Earnest while in the city), while Algernon often leaves the city to go to the country to visit his “sick friend,” Bunbury. As you can imagine, hijinks ensue, especially when each of the men falls in love while using the false name Earnest! It was a lot of fun and lots of laughs.

I finally gave up on waiting for the library (my requested book has shown “in transit” for over two weeks now, and our state is only 150 miles long!) and bought the e-book so I could read before book group on Thursday. This month’s selection is The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, a nonfiction book. Scientists agree there have been 5 mass extinctions since life began on Earth, based on the fossil record. Many also agree that we are now entering into a sixth. I was worried this book might be dry, but … wow. I am only on chapter 2 of 13, and it is already fascinating … and yes, terrifying, too. Chapter 1 is about huge numbers and entire species of amphibians disappearing all over the world; I had no idea this was going on! In chapter 2, she is going much further back in time to the mastadon and reviewing the history of how humans first began to identify bizarre-looking fossils and finally came around to the idea that extinction was a thing.

I finished listening to a YA novel on audio called Furious Thing by Jenny Downham. I loved her earlier novel, Unbecoming, so much that I chose it as my Best Teen/YA Book Read in 2016. Lexi is 15 and is constantly told that she misbehaves and has a bad temper. She is filled with anger that often comes out at the worst times. If only she could change herself so that her stepfather would like her, her mother would love her like she used to, and maybe she’d even have friends. The only person she can talk to is her stepbrother, but now he’s off at school. Lexi works hard to transform herself, pushing her anger down deep. Yeah, you know how well that’s going to work! Downham has a talent for writing strong, well-developed characters and for digging deep into issues affecting many people, and this novel is no exception. There is so much more to it than first meets the eye. It was very good, with an excellent ending.

Now, I am listening to The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, an author I always enjoy. She is a Native American author who writes novels about Native American people, families, and their lives. In this case, her latest novel is based in history and the life of her own grandfather. Did you know that in 1953 Congress passed a resolution to disband and abolish all tribes, take all land from Native Americans and “relocate” them to urban areas? I didn’t, and the historical backdrop here is stunning and horrifying. But, as always, Erdrich focuses in on one Indian community, a group of families, and what happened to them at that time because of that push from Congress. I also love that Erdrich always reads her own audiobooks, so the accent and cadence of her speech is authentic (this novel is about the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, of which she is part). So, far, it is immersive and engrossing.

My husband, Ken, is reading one of his Christmas gifts, taking a break from his usual thrillers to read Erik Larson’s latest nonfiction book, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz. As the subtitle indicates, this book is focused on the year-long bombing campaign that Hitler waged on London during WWII, with a focus on Churchill’s leadership of the British people during this horrific period. He seems engrossed in it already and has begun reading me interesting tidbits (always a good sign with nonfiction). Did you know that Churchill had a black cat named Nelson? Ken is enjoying it so far and already learning a lot.

Our son, 26, took his dad’s advice and read a book he lent to him when he was home recently: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin, a prequel to the A Game of Thrones series. This one book compiles the first three prequel novellas that Martin wrote, which take place a century before the events in A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book in A Game of Thrones series. It’s about a young, inexperienced knight named Ser Duncan (Dunk, for short), and his small squire, a boy named Egg. My husband and son both love The Game of Thrones (books and TV series!), and he is enjoying the book like his dad did.  

Next, our son re-read Spellslinger by Sebastien de Castell so that he could read book 2 of the Spellslinger series, Shadowblack. The series is about a mage named Kellen who loses his magic and goes on a quest to reclaim it. In the second book, he is forced to live as an outlaw. The description says this series is “bursting with tricks, humor, and a whole new way to look at magic.” No wonder our son likes it!

Blog posts from last week:

Movie Monday: Blow the Man Down – amusing movie about the dark underbelly of a quiet Maine fishing village

Fiction Review: Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson – fun, quirky collection of short stories with some fantasy woven into real-life stories

Middle-Grade Review: A Home for Goddesses and Dogs by Leslie Connor – a warm and funny story of love, loss, and finding your place in the world.

Summary of Books Read in January – my reading year is off to a great start!

What Are You Reading Monday is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date, so head over and check out her blog and join the Monday fun! You can also participate in a kid/teen/YA version hosted by Unleashing Readers.

What are you and your family reading this week?