It's Monday 1/3! What Are You Reading?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I hope everyone enjoyed a relaxing holiday week, full of reading!  We had a busy week - it seems like much more than a week ago since my last Monday post.  We flew to Oklahoma to visit my father-in-law.  There are no direct flights, so it takes a full day's travel each way.  The bright side of that is LOTS of reading time!  Between long waits in airports (our first flight was delayed 4 hours), long flights, plus a lot of quiet time at my father-in-law's (he's 85 years old and loves on his own), we all fit in lots of time with some good books:

• I had an excellent book for traveling:  Pendragon Book 10: the Soldiers of Halla by D.J. MacHale.  I absolutely loved the Pendragon series, and this was a wonderful ending!  At almost 700 pages, it kept me happily occupied most of the week.
• I borrowed my next book off my mother-in-law's old bookshelf: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.  I've been wanting to read this book for years and just never got to it.  Jamie remarked this weekend, "Mom, that must be a good book because you've hardly set it down!"  It was good - I finished it last night and just sat and thought about it after closing the cover.
• I've just started Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks for my library's book discussion next week.  I loved two of her other novels, March and People of the Book, so I'm very much looking forward to this one.
• My husband, Ken, read one of his new Christmas gift books during our trip, Breathless by Dean Koontz.  He said it was confusing at first, with lots of different story lines, but they eventually came together, and he enjoyed the book overall.
• Now he's home sick today and reading a book he borrowed from his dad, Bodies Left Behind by Jeffrey Deaver.  I just listened to an interesting interview with Jeffrey Deaver this weekend on the Reading and Writing Podcast (this one was podcast #27).
• Ready for this?  Jamie, 16, read four books in the first three days of our trip, then waited (rather impatiently) for me to finish mine so he could read that, too!  He kicked off the trip by finishing The Magician of Hoad by Margaret Mahy.  He enjoyed it very much but said her earlier novel, Madigan's Fantasia, is still his favorite.
• Next, he zipped through three books in one of his favorite series, Ranger's Apprentice by John Flanagan:  Book 5: The Sorcerer of the North, Book 6: The Siege of Macindaw, and Book 7: Erak's Ransom.  He says he's going to use the Borders gift card he got for Christmas to get Book 8!
• Jamie breathed down my neck for the next day while waiting for me to finish Pendragon Book 10: the Soldiers of Halla by D.J. MacHale, then snatched it up as soon as I turned the last page.  He read this 700-page book in less than 24 hours on the way home!  He is truly a reading machine.
• Craig, 12, was excited about the two books he got for Christmas, but only read the prologue of The Time Pirate by Ted Bell.  He thinks he may need to re-read the first book first.  He'll have a chance to dive into his new books now that school is starting again.
• Finally, our family finished listening to an audio book that we started the week before, A Million Shades of Gray by Cynthia Kadohata, a wonderful middle-grade/teen book about a boy who wants to be an elephant trainer, growing up in the jungles of Vietnam during the war.

Now, it's back to our regular routines and more limited reading time, but I'm looking forward to lots of great books in 2011!


What are you and your family reading this week?


(What are you reading Monday is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.)