It's Monday 5/31! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Happy Memorial Day to those in the U.S.! It’s been a low-key holiday weekend at our house and a strange way to kick-off the unofficial start of summer. It was in the 40′s and raining most of the weekend. I was wearing a flannel shirt and cooked soup yesterday! Not the typical Memorial Day weekend festivities.

We were also low-key because we had a very hectic week. Our older son and his girlfriend spent the week here and just headed back to NY on Saturday. They were pretty busy, meeting up with old friends (my son got to see both of his best friends since Kindergarten!), but it was nice to have them here. At the same time, our younger son moved all of his stuff back into the house, as he was transferred to a neighboring state recently for his job and is in-between apartments for now. So, things were pretty hectic here!

The big news this weekend, though, was the official kick-off to the 2021 Big Book Summer Reading Challenge! This is the 9th year I’ve hosted this annual challenge, and everyone (including me) has been so excited to get started. The idea is to use the lazy days of summer (or the busy days, depending on your life) to read a bigger book (or two or three or  …) you’ve been meaning to get to. A “big book” is defined as any book with 400 or more pages, and you only have to read one between now and early September to participate. All the details and how to sign-up (via blog, YouTube, Goodreads, or just by leaving a comment) are on the challenge page. It’s super easy-going, like summer!

I love going through my overflowing to-be-read bookcase and choosing a stack of Big Books that I can work on during the summer (I won’t get to all of them, but I like to have options). You can see my own plans for Big Book Summer 2021 in My Big Book Summer post or in this brief YouTube video, where I provide more details on the books I hope to read.

If you want to participate, but you need some Big Book inspiration, check out my new Big Books! list on Bookshop, which includes over 50 Big Books–in all genres, types, and for all ages–that I’ve enjoyed in previous summers. 

Hope you’ll join the fun this summer!

And, onto what we’ve all been reading this past week:

I finished my neighborhood book group selection for this week: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. This psychological thriller is about a woman named Alicia who murders her husband and then stops speaking. Alicia is a famous painter, and her husband was a well-known fashion photographer. They seemed to have a wonderful, loving marriage, so what happened? Alicia’s silence continues for years, as she remains at the Grove, a secure forensic psychiatric facility in London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who, by his own admission, has his own issues stemming from an abusive childhood. Theo becomes obsessed with Alicia and manages to get himself hired at the Grove and assigned to her case. Everyone else has given up, since she won’t communicate at all, but Theo thinks he can connect with her and solve the mystery. There was plenty of suspense and lots of twists and surprises!

Now, I am reading my first Big Book Summer book! I still have one more book group selection to read for next week before my book groups go on a summer hiatus, so I chose the shortest Big Book in my stack (exactly 400 pages), End of Watch by Stephen King. Also, it’s King, so I know I will read it very quickly–his novels are just so compelling! This is the 3rd and final book in the Mr. Mercedes trilogy. I enjoyed Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers. And my husband has been waiting for me to read this last book, so he and I can watch season 2 of the Mr. Mercedes TV show! I won’t give away any spoilers, but this third book continues the story of Bill Hodges, a retired police detective in Ohio, and his now-business-partner, Holly Gibney (who also makes an appearance in King’s The Outsider). Together, they solved the case of the Mercedes Massacre, but now a suspiciously odd string of suicides brings them back into an active police investigation. It is already gripping, suspenseful, and I hate to set it down each night!

I just a few minutes ago finished listening to Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. She is one of my all-time favorite authors, and her novels, The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees (along with its sequel, Pigs in Heaven), are among my all-time favorite books. Like those, this is an earlier novel (published in 1990), and she reads the audio herself. She has the most wonderful, soothing voice and completely inhabits the characters she is narrating. In this case, that’s mainly Codi, a woman who has returned to her tiny hometown in Arizona for the first time since she left after high school. She’s not in close touch with her father, the town doctor, but she’s heard he’s suffering from dementia. Her beloved sister is in Nicaragua (it’s set in the 80′s), helping the farmers there, so Codi is on her own. As with most of Kingsolver’s novels, there is an environmental crisis here (though not the main story), along with Native American cultures and legends. Codi is struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants to do with her life … and maybe falling in life with her high school boyfriend. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Kingsolver narrate this beautifully written, gentle, lyrical story. She is a master storyteller.

Next up for me on audio is another Big Book! (Yes, audios count, too, based on the page count in the print book.) I am getting ready to start The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames, a novel published in 2019. I’ve heard lots of rave reviews of this book, so I’ve been looking forward to listening to it (saving it for Big Book Summer). According to the blurb, it’s the story of a woman named Stella, who encounters many life-threatening incidents during her childhood in rural Italy. She protects her younger sister, Tina, but life changes dramatically when the family immigrates to the United States just before WWII. The story is apparently told from the perspective of a family member in Connecticut in the present day, to explain why the two now-elderly sisters don’t get along. It sounds like an engaging family epic – I’m ready!

So for two weeks now, I’ve been telling you that my husband, Ken, was reading Camino Island by John Grisham and describing the plot as: “It takes place on a quiet island off the coast of Florida, where Bruce Cable owns a small bookstore and also deals in rare books (which are occasionally not completely legal). A young novelist with writer’s block, Mercer Mann, is paid a lot of money to go undercover and infiltrate Cable’s circle of literary friends, to discover his secrets.” Yes, that’s all true … except the book my husband was reading was Camino Winds by John Grisham, not Camino Island! I gave it to my husband for Easter, and it is book TWO in this short series, not book one. I finally noticed my mistake this week. He still enjoyed it and now understands why he sometimes thought he had missed something. lol 

My husband has also joined the Big Book Summer Challenge again and started his first big book of 2021: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Like me, he likes to read classics once in a while, and this one has been on our shelves for a while. It’s about the Spanish Civil War and is based on Hemingway’s own travels to Spain as a journalist in 1937 to cover the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. I think this is the third Hemingway novel my husband has read, but I have never read anything by Hemingway! I know, isn’t that crazy? I never even read any Hemingway in school. So, I’d like to read this one, too, though I don’t know if I will get to it this summer, since my Big Book Summer plans already include the classic, Anna Karenina, which I know will take me a long time to read!

Our 26-year-old son is still immersed in one of his favorite series, Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. He’s reading book 4, Rhythm of War, which is a mere 1232 pages … and hardcover! He loves epic fantasy, the longer the better–it’s always Big Book Summer for him! He brought the book home with him, but I don’t think he had much time for reading this past week, with all their social engagements.

Blog posts from last week:

TV Tuesday: For All Mankind – An outstanding show about an alternate history of the U.S. space program – we love this show!

2021 Big Book Summer Reading Challenge – all the details for this easy-going, fun challenge

My 2021 Big Book Summer – check out the stack of Big Books I have ready!

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?