It's Monday! (8/17/15)

It's Monday! is sponsored by Sheila at Book Journey.

 

As you read this, I'm on a three-day reading vacation! Each August I participate in the Bout of Books Read-a-thon, and I generally take three vacation days to do nothing but stay home and read. If there's a better way to take vacation, I haven't discovered it yet! I don't always officially sign up and link up, because daily reading updates bore me to write and likely bore others to read, but I'm with the 'thon in spirit at any rate.

 

Beyond reading, I hope to get a couple things done around the house. I need to weed the garden, for one. I also want to get started on a couple jewelry designs I've got floating around in my head. And I need to straighten up my study because I don't even like to enter it these days. But mostly, it's just me and the couch and books.  

 

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Last week I finished three books. I loved (can't emphasize this enough) The River of Doubt. It started out slow, but when it picked up, it got really good. It's an adventure story full of suspense. I highly recommend it.

 

I read Babymouse: Queen of the World! at my desk on break after a copy was donated to the library. This is the first in a series of 16 graphic novels for kids. I enjoyed it, and I think I'll order a couple more for the library.

 

I also finished Garlic and Sapphires last week, and I was sad for it to be over. Years ago I'd read Ruth Reichl's other memoirs about food, but I don't remember them well. After this one, I now want to re-read them all, plus I've added her most recent novel, Delicious! to my TBR. In this book, Reichl, who has just become the New York Times restaurant critic, is forced to use disguises to make her trips to area restaurants anonymous. The way her personality takes on the disguise's persona and people's reactions to her based on how she looks is fascinating. It brings up a lot of questions about personal interaction and how closely personality is tied to outer cues. Reichl is a very good writer, and her descriptions of food are truly yummy. I highly recommend this one.

 

 

 

I have less than an hour left in my Mansfield Park audio. This novel seemed to have more build up than her others (or was that related to listening to it rather than reading it?), and I truly wasn't sure how it would end. Now I can't wait to find out.

 

I'm also a few pages away from the end of Sister Mother Husband Dog, and I'm really enjoying Delia Ephron. She has a clipped, personal, almost conversational, writing style which I find refreshing. Not sure I'd want to read a lot of books that trip along the way Ephron's does, but I have liked it very much.

 

I also don't have much left to read in The Best American Poetry 2011. Last week I read a poem that was truly phenomenal in its structure. It had a complicated rhyme scheme I've never seen before, and it repeated lines from stanza to stanza and then put all of the repeated lines together in the last stanza. The poem itself  was about Motown music, and its style really blew me away.

 

 

So, I'll be finishing these three up during the read-a-thon, and then I'll be starting two or three or all four of the rest of my August reading list: