It's Monday 12/30! What Are You Reading?

Happy Almost New Year!

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season with their friends and families. Last week was very busy and hectic here, but we also enjoyed some wonderful family time and a bit of friend time. Christmas Day was a series of mishaps, but we enjoyed our morning traditions and (eventually) sat down to a nice dinner together.

Christmas Dinner (a bit late!)

I was pretty wiped out after Christmas; I had gone way beyond the limits of my chronic illness! A couple of days of (mostly) resting did the trick. We also met up with some old friends for lunch (their "kids" were home for the holidays), and our son treated us and his girlfriend's family to the holiday display at a local botanical garden - pretty much the hottest ticket in town and very sweet of him to plan it all!

Trees lit up at Longwood Gardens

Decorations inside a greenhouse at Longwood Gardens

And now, here we are just a couple of days from the New Year - I love this part of the season! I love starting a new calendar (I'm still using a paper calendar), having extra time to get things caught up in this post-Christmas week. Spent all morning finally sending out a big stack of claims to our health insurance company - a dreaded (and long postponed) but very necessary job.

Now I get to tell you what we've all been reading this week! I like this job way better than messing with insurance claim forms, invoices, and receipts. Quickly approaching the end of the reading year!

I finished Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, a novel I have been wanting to read after hearing rave reviews, its appearance on every Best of 2018 list, and winning the National Book Award for Fiction. It's about a poor family in Mississippi. A black woman named Leonie, who's addicted to drugs, has two children with her white boyfriend, who's in prison, so her parents are bringing up the two mixed-race children, Jo Jo and Kayla. Chapters alternate between Jo Jo's perspective and Leonie's (with a few others interspersed), as thirteen-year-old Jo Jo tries desperately to take care of toddler Kayla. Mam and Pop, as they call their grandparents, are kind and loving but older and struggling with health problems. There is also an element of the supernatural, as several family members have unusual abilities, including seeing dead people. I'm not always a fan of that kind of mysticism woven into a novel, but this story and its characters were engrossing and powerful.

Next, I decided to try to fit in one last book I received last Christmas before I got more books this Christmas. I am reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, an author I have never read before (gasp!). It's a sort of day-in-the-life story set in London after WWI, with Clarissa Dalloway as the main character. My intention was to pick a short book I could finish before the end of the year, but this one is a bit slow-going. It features long sentences, long paragraphs, LOTS of semi-colons, and no chapter breaks! It's interesting, and at a bit past the halfway point, I am interested in the characters, but it is also a bit rambling for my taste. There are long passages that suddenly switch to the perspective of a minor character. So, I am enjoying it but also getting impatient with it. I know it is a beloved classic, so I am trying to give it a fair shot, but I keep getting sleepy when I try to read it!

On audio, I finished another novel I've been looking forward to (and another highly acclaimed Best of 2018 book), Census by Jesse Bell. Like Sing, Unburied, Sing, this novel also includes some sort of mystical elements and symbolism. In this story, a surgeon father who lost his wife finds out that he's dying and has about a year left. He decides to spend that time traveling all over with his adult son, who has Down syndrome, taking part in the census. This is a world similar to but different from ours, where the towns are named with letters, from A to Z, in concentric circles, and the census taker marks each citizen on the ribs with a kind of tattoo, after talking with them. The narrative is rambling and random-feeling, as the man and his son travel from town to town, and he muses about the present, the past, and all sorts of random things, like cormorants (the bird on the cover). So, it's a very unusual book--in fact downright weird at times--but I am glad I stuck with it.

Now, I am listening to Remarkables by Margaret Peterson Haddix, a recent release and middle-grade sci fi adventure. I tried to choose something short that I could fit in before the end of the year, but it is also fast-paced, which is a nice change from the other books I've been reading and listening to. A young girl named Marin moves to a new town with her family and discovers something strange going on in the woods behind her new house. She's up in a tree and sees a group of teenagers hanging out and laughing together ... and then they all suddenly disappear and later reappear. Marin is stunned and intrigued and teams up with a neighbor her age, Charlie, who knows more about what's going on but tries to warn her away. This was just what I needed right now - fast, fun, and mysterious! Haddix is always a sure bet for exciting and original middle-grade adventures.

My husband, Ken, finished reading a birthday gift I gave him, Recursion by Blake Crouch. This is one of those gift books I gave him in part because I want to read it myself! I'm happy he's read it now because it means I can read it next. We both enjoyed Crouch's last novel, Dark Matter (one of my favorite books read in 2017), and the TV shows he wrote and/or were based on his novels, including Wayward Pines and Good Behavior. Ken said that this one reminded him of Dark Matter and had the same kind of twisty, convoluted plot. He enjoyed it and read it quickly. I can't wait to read it next!

Now, Ken has started reading a new Christmas gift that our son gave him, The Raven Tower by Anne Leckie. The two of them enjoy the same kind of fantasy novels (they are also watching Game of Thrones together on DVD!), so our son had fun picking this one out for his dad (he hasn't read it yet either). I see that this is Leckie's first fantasy novel, but she has won Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards, so she must be a good writer! Patrick Rothfus, an author whom they both enjoy, said of this novel, "It's a delight to read something so different, so wonderful and strange." Sounds like a winner! I'm sure our son will want to borrow it after his dad finishes it - like mother, like son!

I think our son, 25, is still reading Web of Eyes by Rhett C. Bruno and Jaime Castle, book 1 in the Buried Goddess Saga series. According to its blurb, a rotten thief and a stubborn knight must work together to save a broken kingdom, which sounds like exactly the sort of plot my son likes! He's enjoying it so far, though he did wonder on Christmas day if he should switch to one of his new books that he is excited to read.



Blog posts from last week:

Books for Christmas - the books we all gave and received!

Nonfiction Review: Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall - engrossing and fascinating account of the lives of chimps

Middle-Grade Review: Stargazing by Jen Wang - a warm graphic novel about friendship

What Are You Reading Monday is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date, so head over and check out her blog and join the Monday fun! You can also participate in a kid/teen/YA version hosted by Unleashing Readers.

You can follow me on Twitter at @SueBookByBook or on Facebook on my blog's page.   

What are you and your family reading this week?