It's Monday 5/16! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Ahhh … a quiet Monday at home. I need this! I finally finished my whirlwind four trips in three weeks. It’s all been fun–but exhausting!–and now I am ready to just hunker down at home and recover for at least a few weeks. This week’s adventures included my father-in-law’s 97th birthday and a family gathering in Connecticut for my mom’s birthday.

Friday, my father-in-law turned 97, so my husband and I visited him in the nursing home at noon. We brought him a McDonald’s vanilla shake, a homemade lemon meringue pie (his favorites!), and a few gifts to open. He was pretty out of it (his dementia is severe now), but he woke up enough to enjoy it. He loved the treats and had fun opening his gifts. And it’s a good thing my husband took time off to visit with me at lunchtime because by dinner, he was in another world (and not a happy one). So, we’re glad we could give him some treats and pleasures on his birthday.

Saturday morning, we drove to Connecticut for our first full family gathering since 2019! I’d seen individuals once or twice (except my niece), but this was the first time in years my immediate family was all together. It was so wonderful to see my niece and nephew again and spend time with them–they are both so grown up! And it was great spending time with my own sons–we’re rarely all together these days. It was pretty exhausting for me, after the flurry of activity the past few weeks, but I managed it. We got home about 3 pm yesterday and have no plans to leave the house! (Well, my husband’s at a doctor appointment, and I’ll be visiting my father-in-law in an hour, but we’re not traveling anywhere for awhile.) I promised I wouldn’t post photos online (some are sensitive to that), so here’s the delicious BBQ dinner we had on Saturday night.

And, all of a sudden, it’s May 16! Wow. As I suspected, we jumped from rain and cool 50′s right into mid-80′s, but we should get some nicer weather later this week. The trees around here are finished blooming, but the ground last week was carpeted with pink blossoms outside of the nursing home!

And my annual Big Book Summer Challenge starts next Friday!! It sort of snuck up on me, with all that’s been going on, but I do already have a stack of big books set aside. If you’re new to the challenge, you can check out my post from Big Book Summer 2021 (this year’s challenge page will go up on Friday, May 27). The challenge runs until early September, and the idea is to use summer (or winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere) to tackle a bigger book (or two or more!). A Big Book has 400 or more pages, and you can just choose one to read or devote the whole season to Big Books, like I do. 

So, get ready! Start looking through your shelves and your TBR list for those bigger books you’ve been putting off reading, and set them aside for Big Book Summer 2022! And this is the 10th anniversary of the challenge, so I will try to make it extra special, with a new logo, an extra giveaway, and some cool Big Book Summer products!

I uploaded two new book videos last week:

April Reading Wrap-Up – a quick recap of the five great books I read last month

Friday Reads 5-13-22 – my brief weekly update on what I’m reading

And here’s what we’ve all been reading this past week:

I am still reading a Booktopia selection, a memoir called The Year of the Horses by Courtney Maum. I didn’t get to her author session, but she gave a hilarious wrap-up talk about publishing a novel at the end of Booktopia Saturday night. This book, however, is about her personal battles with severe depression. She was married with a two-year-old daughter when her insomnia and other symptoms finally got bad enough for her to seek help. Looking back, she realized she had struggled since childhood. She turned back to her childhood passion, horses and riding, to help herself heal. I am about 80% finished now, but I did something I almost never do and set it aside briefly when I realized my neighborhood book group meets this week!

Luckily, I was able to get a library copy pretty quickly of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michelle Richardson for my book group. I didn’t get much reading done at my mom’s, but at bedtime last night I was able to get immersed in the story, and it is already so compelling! In 1936, nineteen-year-old Cussy is working as a Pack Horse Librarian, as part of the WPA, bringing books via horse or mule to her isolated neighbors in the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky. Cussy is the last living female of the Blue People of Kentucky, a family whose genetic defect that caused blue skin was passed down through generations. I had to go to Wikipedia yesterday to look this up, and it is all based on fact, including the location of Troublesome Creek. It’s a wonderful historical novel so far, and Cussy is a fabulous heroine, spreading literacy and the joy of books through her very poor and insulated community.

On audio, I am still listening to The Hollows by Jess Montgomery, book two in the Kinship series, historical mysteries set in 1920′s southeastern Ohio and featuring the first female sheriff in the state. This is also historical fiction (strange that I ended up by chance reading two books set in the Appalachians in about the same time period!). In book one, The Widows, Lily’s husband dies and she is asked to take over his position as sheriff of the rural county, with her first job to investigate her husband’s murder. Now, Lily is running for election on her own when an elderly woman is found dead on nearby train tracks, clearly having plunged from the tunnel overhead onto a moving freight train. As Lily begins her investigation, she starts to suspect this was not an accident. The story delves into the mystery, the sheriff’s race, the difficult decision Lily’s best friend must make, and even the KKK beginning to infiltrate their area. It is wonderful on audio and completely engrossing; I’m really enjoying it. 

My husband, Ken, is still reading the new book I put in his Easter basket, Afterland by Lauren Beukes. I picked this one out for him because we both liked Shining Girls, by the same author, and we are very excited about the new TV adaptation that started last week on Apple TV, starring … Elizabeth Moss! We can’t wait to watch it. Meanwhile, this newer novel from Beukes is a post-apocalyptic story about a world where most of the men are dead. A twelve-year-old boy named Miles is one of the few boys left, and his mother will protect him at any cost, from the many women who want a piece of him: as a scarce reproductive resource, a sex object, or a substitute son. It’s described as a high-stakes thriller that Stephen King said is “smartly written,” so it should be good!

I was able to catch up with our son’s (27) reading this weekend! He finished reading The Written by Ben Galley, book one of the Emaneska series. It is fantasy, of course–his favorite genre. It’s described as Game of Thrones meets Diehard and “an explosive epic fantasy.”He said the plot was good but the characters felt a bit shallow to him. He’s heard the second book is better, so he may try that. In the meantime, he has started reading a new-to-him series, Art of the Adept by Michael G. Manning, with book 1, The Choice of Magic. He’s enjoying it so far. 

 Blog posts from last week:

Fiction Review: Black Cloud Rising by David Wright Faladé - Outstanding historical fiction about an all-Black regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War

Fiction Review: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle – science fiction from the famous author, about an expedition that finds dinosaurs still alive in the modern world