It's Monday 5/22! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Life

I’d like to focus on the books this week but first, just a quick mention of what happened last week. On Monday, we got the news that our great nephew (our nephew’s 13-year-old son) died suddenly and horrifically on Sunday. We cancelled all our plans and flew to Texas for the funeral this weekend.

We’ve been to a lot of funerals in our families in the past ten years (and too many just in the past year), but this was a whole different experience. His big sister planned his memorial service and created a beautiful, moving, shattering slideshow. The service was perfect, but everything about this week was completely devastating for all.

It took us over 24 hours to get home, due to the assortment of delays, issues, and emergencies that seem to only happen in the airline industry. We spent 12 hours in the Houston airport yesterday, finally flew to Dallas at night, got a brief 6 hours of sleep in a nearby hotel, and went back to the airport this morning for a 6 am flight. We’re both exhausted but still so grateful that we could be there with our family this weekend.   

Hug your kids and tell your family members you love them. Life is so fragile.

I hope you’ll pardon this transition from grief to book talk, but I need a bit of normalcy and comfort right now.

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On the Blog

No posts last week after my Monday update, but …

Remember that Big Book Summer, my annual summer reading challenge, kicks off THIS week, at the start of Memorial Day weekend. Check out last year’s challenge page for details, pick out a Big Book (400 or more pages) or two (or more), and join the fun! A new challenge page, video, and Goodreads group for sign-ups will go up on Thursday, May 25 (we have visitors this weekend, so I’ll kick things off a day early).

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On Video

Just a quick 1-minute short last week:

Friday Reads short 

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What We’re Reading

I finished Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler. Delia is the wife of Dr. Grinstead, who took over her father’s medical practice, and the mother of three almost-grown children. She still lives in the house she grew up in, and her life is quiet and predictable. So, it’s a shock to everyone–including Delia herself–when Delia takes a walk down the beach on a family vacation … and never returns. On a whim, she settles in a small, rural town and starts a new life; she rents a room in a boardinghouse and gets a job as a secretary–her first paid job ever (she’s been working as her father’s and then her husband’s secretary her entire life). As Delia starts from scratch, with nothing, she begins to discover her own identity, separate from her family, for the first time. I had mixed feelings about this novel. While I could understand Delia’s need to live on her own terms, as the mother of two grown sons myself, it was hard to relate to leaving one’s children (of any age). I did enjoy Anne Tyler’s renowned warmth and subtle humor (the newspaper article about Delia’s disappearance in the first pages says it all). 

I traveled with only my iPad Mini, so before I left, I downloaded an e-book, The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams, the second quarter readalong pick for the Book Cougars podcast. This is a very comforting read for my state of mind this week (and for being stuck in airports and on planes for two days). It’s about a list of eight books that 17-year-old Aleisha finds stuck in a library book while working at her new job in the library. She’s not much of a reader, but she begins reading the books on the list (classics and modern classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Kite Runner). Things are tough at home for Aleisha, as she helps her brother care for their mother. When an elderly widower named Mukesh comes to the library looking for a book, in an effort to connect with his late wife and his young granddaughter (both avid readers), Aleisha passes him To Kill a Mockingbird, and they end up talking about it together. This is a story about the power of books to soothe and comfort and to connect people. I’m loving it so far, and it provided much-needed escape yesterday during our long hours in the airport.

I forgot to mention last week that my husband and I finished the audiobook we started on vacation last month, The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz. This is book #4 in his Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, where the author has put himself–his real life self–into a fictional world as a character. The author has reluctantly teamed up with Hawthorne, a Holmesian detective, to write a series of true crime books about his cases. In this book, Horowitz says that he’s finished with the partnership but then he himself is accused of murder when someone associated with his new play is killed. He needs Hawthorne to help clear his name. It was my second book in this series (The Word Is Murder, book 1), and my husband’s first, and we both enjoyed the twisty mystery.

Now, I am listening to Into White by Randi Pink, a YA novel I downloaded during a previous SYNC summer (this year’s program, with two free audiobooks each week, just started–at the link). LaToya Williams is a Black girl in her mostly white Alabama high school, where she endures discrimination and bullying from both white and Black students. She wonders how her life would be different and prays one night to wake up “anything but Black.” Her prayers are answered when she wakes up as a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. I had some trouble with the premise at first, but now it’s getting into more emotional depth as LaToya experiences life as a white girl.

My husband, Ken, started reading A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates last week. This is excellent creepy psychological suspense that I read last month for Booktopia. Like me, he stuck to e-books this week for travel (a couple that he had started previously but wasn’t really getting into). Besides, A Flaw in the Design was too dark for him right now. I’m not sure if he’ll go back to it tonight or choose something else for now.

I haven’t checked with our son, but I think he is still reading book 4, The Tunnels Beneath, of The Aldoran Chronicles by Michael Wiseheart. He said his new job is keeping him very busy!

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