It's Monday 6/10! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Whew, June is a busy month! Fortunately, I had a pretty low-key week last week, with no appointments, so I had a chance to catch up a bit and record more of my audio book. It’s been hard to keep up with the amazing response to Big Book Summer this year! My one big outing last week, which could not be put off any longer, was to go shopping for a dress for the wedding we’re attending this coming weekend in Virginia. Success! Shopping is a tough one with my chronic illness, but I found a dress I love in just one trip to one store and about 60 minutes of trying on dozens of dresses! Victory!

Ready for my shopping expedition!

This weekend, we drove to Connecticut for our nephew’s graduation party (and a belated celebration for our niece, who graduated in 2020). It was about 12 hours of driving for about 5 hours with my family, but we’re so glad we could go and celebrate with them! They are both amazing people.

My niece and I

My husband and I with our nephew

My sister held the party at a really cool place with all kinds of games, so both the kids and the adults had a lot of fun! My husband and I relived our youth with skeeball and pinball, and I played cornhole for the first time. My husband and I even won a round. It was great to just hang out with my family and have fun when it wasn’t a holiday. I was in pretty bad shape yesterday (probably my worst day yet this year because I’ve been doing so well), but I had all day to rest in the car. I’m such a wimp these days that I actually had sore muscles from two rounds of cornhole – ha ha! But I’m doing well today.

My son and husband playing cornhole

Our nephew playing pool with his friends

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On the Blog

I didn’t have time to write a review last week–it was Big Book Summer time all the time! You can check out the challenge page for links to about 20 great book blogs and Booktube channels participating (plus many more Booktubers who didn’t add their links–it’s amazing how fast it spread this year!). I’ve enjoyed discovering some new-to-me Booktube channels with great content. And the Big Book Summer Goodreads group now has 102 participants signed up! Lots of fun reading and chatting about books.

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Big Book Summer has added almost 500 new subscribers to my channel in the past month or so, which is stunning! Usually my subscriber count goes up by 10-12 a month. It’s been fun finding so many new-to-me channels. My new videos last week:

May Reading Wrap-Up – an overview of the 7 books I read last month, all excellent. It was a great reading month!

Friday Reads 6-7-24 – my brief weekly update of what I am reading and listening to – last week, it was my two Big Books, on print and audio.

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Now (and probably for quite a few weeks to come!), I am reading my first Big Book of the summer, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. For years, I’ve been hearing readers rave about how wonderful this Western novel is, so I’m glad to finally be reading it for myself. It’s set in 1870 with two older men, Augustus McCrae and Captain Woodrow Call, who are ex-Texas Rangers. They now own a small livery business in the tiny town of Lonesome Dove on the Mexico border, a desolate place. They have a small group of men who live there and help them. Early in the novel, another ex-Ranger named Jake comes to visit, fresh from Montana, and Call gets the idea to put together a herd of cattle and drive them all the way to Montana, even though they haven’t done a cattle drive in years. I’m up to around page 270, and I’m enjoying it very much. The characters and setting are engaging, and it’s got a great sense of humor (always a plus for me). So many other people participating in Big Book Summer were also reading this book that I made it our official readalong book, and I’m enjoying the discussions in the group on Goodreads.

I finished my first audio for Big Book Summer, The Women by Kristin Hannah. What a stunning novel! Perhaps my #1 of the year so far. Twenty-year-old Frankie, recently graduated from nursing school, has taken her family’s dedication to service to heart and enlisted in the Army, to join her beloved brother, Finlay, in Vietnam. But her parents are horrified, especially after they are notified that Finlay was killed. After basic training, Frankie is shipped to Vietnam and immediately taken to a remote field hospital. It was all men on her flight, but in the field, she meets her roommates, Barb and Ethel, two other nurses. Her first day there, multiple helicopters carry in soldiers, wounded in horrible ways, and Frankie is immediately out of her depth. The novel follows Frankie and her friends not just during their horrific experiences in the war but through the aftermath of it and what the soldiers experienced upon returning to the U.S. Wow, this is such an amazing novel–completely engrossing and so powerful. It’s also an important book, bringing to light the experiences of women in Vietnam, which were mostly overlooked. I need to pick my next audio Big Book, but I’m not ready to move on yet.

This weekend, my husband and I started an audio book (Big Book, of course) while traveling because we have 3 road trips planned in the next 3 weeks! We started listening to Luminous Dead by Caitlyn Starling, a unique sci fi thriller. It’s been compared to The Martian by Andy Weir because it features only one character physically present, with a second monitoring from afar. The set-up here is a cave diver who signed up for a special expedition on a planet filled with caves. Gyre lied about her qualifications to get the job, but now she’s on her own, well below ground, with only a voice, who says to call her Em, in her helmet to keep her company. Gyre expected a whole team to be backing her up, but she soon discovers it’s just Em, who is keeping the reason for the expedition a secret. Em has full control over Gyre’s high-tech suit, but Gyre doesn’t like to give up control. As the mission gets more and more dangerous, Gyre must rely on Em, though she knows she’s lied. Oh, and there’s some sort of creature on this planet called a Tunneler who strikes fear into both women’s hearts. It’s good so far, different but very suspenseful and intriguing.

My husband’s first Big Book for the summer (yes, he joins the challenge, too!) is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, one of my favorites from last summer (my review at the link). I hope he enjoys this suspenseful, funny, heartbreaking classic as much as I did. 

Our son, 29, is probably still reading book 2 of the Licanius Trilogy by James Islington, An Echo of Things to Come since he was pretty busy this past week driving all over the US! When he was a kid, he’d bring an entire duffel bag stuffed full of books on our 3-week summer road trip, but he’s trying to keep his girlfriend company when it’s her turn to drive. They’ve had an amazing road trip so far and will be home on Wednesday. This past week, they explored Yellowstone, enjoyed the Black Hills and Badlands National Park in South Dakota (our family favorites), stopped in Iowa, Chicago, Cleveland, Indiana Dunes National Park, and are now in West Virginia, where they greatly enjoyed whitewater rafting yesterday. What an epic trip!

Badlands National Park

Mount Rushmore, SD

Whitewater Rafting

Yellowstone National Park

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