It's Monday! What are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Share what you (are, have been, are about to, hope to be) reading or reviewing this week. Sign Mr Linky at Book Journey and visit other Monday reading roundups.

I am still reading the ebook for Bookjourney's Read-a-Long for Daphne du Mauier's Rebecca.  And I have continued reading the ebook I was reading aloud to my Mom while staying there: At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon.

I've been home for three weeks now.  Still so much catching up to do on every front.  It didn't help that I was sick for two days last week and just as I started to feel myself again we got hit with a heat wave--high 90s.  No AC.  I've taken to sleeping through the heat--from early afternoon until after dark. Today it was just after midnight when I woke so this post is going up late and has to have it's timestamp jiggered.

There is one downside to having gravitated to ebook when your only reader is a netbook. It isn't heatwave friendly activity.  First the netbook generates heat making it hard to be near it let alone touching it.  Second you have to keep it away from water so no reading in a cool bath or immediately after pouring a jug of cold water over yourself.

Until a couple of days ago I'd been taking Rebecca slow but it became my primary read over the last couple of days.  Besides those two novels which I will continue to read over the next week or three I also returned to the several non-fiction books I've had going for some time: 


The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Go by Les Edgerton
Get Your Loved One Sober by Robert Meyers
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Leher

All four of those are research for the writing side of my life.  The third one for a character tho I won't deny I there are potential real life applications for the info.

I am taking all four slow as that is my preferred way to read non-fic.  It sticks with me longer.

Tho it was posted two weeks ago I want to point you towards my review for Joshua Henkin's The World Without You.  I was really looking forward to this one as I loved his Matrimony. It met my expectations and then some.

This has got to be the best book I've finished recently.  When I started reading The End of Everything by Megan Abbott and it took over my life.  Let me suggest that starting a book that features a missing child is not a recommended bedtime activity.

To call this a story about a missing child tho is quite misleading.  It is much more.  With its 13 year old narrator it has all the earmarks of a coming of age story but I'm not quite sure it is that or at least not only that.  It is like reading a dream.

And this wasn't even one of the ten or so review copy books I still owe reviews for.  It was in my ebook library and I didn't recognize the title so I opened it.  At 5am.  Already two hours past my ideal bedtime.  Next thing I knew it was nearly noon.

I did posted my review on the 26th!!

My hopes of getting a review up for Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration this past week were dashed by illness followed by a heat wave.  I loved this one as much or more than The End of Everything.  But I may have to nearly reread it as I read it the week I was preparing for the trip back to Mom's near the end of March.  Besides the first time through I had difficulty separating out the emotional triggers rooted in my personal history from the 'legitimate' author-intended emotional impact.  Tho maybe I'm mistaken in thinking that is necessary.  If even possible.

The narrator protagonist is a pre-teen being raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect that is so similar to the one I was raised in, it might even be the same one or the parent sect to the parent sect of ours.  The author doesn't name the sect though.  She is being bullied at school because of the strangeness her faith imparts on her in the eyes of the other kids--just as I was.  And she escapes the pain of this isolation through elaborate daydreams and building of a model of the Promised Land aka Land of Decoration out of scraps, trash, weeds and clay.  Just as I did if you substitute story writing and the world building of those stories in my daydreams.

I am still reading a novel for a blog tour slated for next month.  For this tour I'm to post twice: a review on August 7th and an author interview with giveaway on August 8th.  This is for The Reluctant Matchmaker by Shobhan Bantwal.  I'm already well over half way through the PDF ARC I received.


I've always read multiple non-fic concurrently but I nearly never used to read two novels at once let alone...how many now?  They are not all listed here.  Only the ones I spent time with this past week and/or intend to spend time with in the coming week.  Besides Grace McCleen's novel I have 8 or 10 more review copies lined up and that is only the physical ones and the ones already in my possession.  More are on the way.


I have been anxious to get back the library books I was reading before my first trip to Mom's in January but I'm still looking for my library card which I can't remember seeing since our move the day after Christmas.  I may just have to report it missing and get a new one.  Again.  The last time was just last fall which was the first time in decades.  I was sure it would turn up in the sorting and unpacking from the move but I've been through everything I think.