It's Monday 2/14! What Are You Reading?

Hosted by The Book Date

💜 HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! 💜

I hope everyone had fun watching the Superbowl last night (or mostly watching the ads and eating the food, like I did) and is enjoying a nice Valentine's Day today! I love all these mini holidays and events this time of year, as I explained in a recent video Celebrate Everything, Big and Small! 

We made all our favorite snack treats last night for the Superbowl, and watched the game and ads. Our son joined us for the first half, which was fun.

Lots of yummy treats for Superbowl!

 

Used our new air fryer for Buffalo chicken!

Today, I am dressed in red with heart socks and earrings on. We give each other cards and goodies for Valentine's Day, and my husband and I will celebrate tonight with takeout (and dessert!) from a favorite restaurant.

This is a nice celebratory end to a very difficult, exhausting week. My 96-year-old father-in-law is back in the hospital. The nursing home called us at 4 am Thursday to tell us they were calling an ambulance for him. I'll spare you the details, but after a few days, the doctors in the hospital concluded that he was mostly severely dehydrated. This was frustrating, as we've been telling the nursing home staff that for the past month. We're not sure if he's headed back to the nursing home or to hospice yet. It depends on if he can eat and drink on his own, but it's just been so devastating the past few months to see him decline so much and become so frail and infirm. 

I did manage to upload two new videos to my YouTube channel last week:

• Celebrate Everything, Big and Small! Though recorded for the chronic illness side of my channel, I'm finding this video's been fun for everyone! Several book bloggers/booktubers found it this weekend and enjoyed it, too. See how we celebrate the small stuff to add joy to our lives.
• January Reading Wrap-Up - I am no longer posting monthly book summaries here on my blog (part of my effort to simplify and streamline this year), but you can hear all about my January reads in this video. It was a great reading month!

 Here's what we've all been reading this past week. I'm still reading for Black History Month:

I finished reading Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, a novel my husband gave me for Christmas that I've been dying to read! It's set in the early 1960's about a man named Ray Carney, who is torn between the legitimate furniture business he started and his wife and children and the pull of earning extra money through criminal activities, like other members of his family. It was wonderful and really made the time and place come to life, as well as the characters.

 

This weekend, I was ready to start Kindred by Octavia Butler for an upcoming book group ... until I discovered it was not on my Kindle as I thought! (That was a different Butler novel.) So, I needed something really quick until I could get a copy. I chose a middle-grade novel from my shelves, Ruby Lee and Me by Shannon Hitchcock. I am almost finished with it now and am really enjoying it. It's a sweet story about twelve-year-old Sarah, whose little sister was badly injured in a car accident that Sarah blames herself for. Sarah is living on her grandparents' farm while her sister's in the hospital and has always been best friends with Ruby, a Black girl who lives next door. But, the upcoming integration of the local school has the whole town worried and even comes between Sarah and Ruby. It's a warm, moving novel that deals with some serious topics honestly.

 

On audio, I'm still listening to a book that fits perfectly for Black History Month, Black Boy by Richard Wright, a memoir first published in 1945. The author talks about his childhood in rural Mississippi in the Jim Crow South, about poverty, hunger, racism, abuse, and fear. The audio is excellent, and hearing the author's words from a first-person perspective is especially evocative and powerful. 

 

My husband, Ken, thoroughly enjoyed some entertaining escapism with his favorite series, Jack Reacher, reading the latest book (#26), Better Off Dead by Lee Child and Andrew Child, Lee's brother. I gave this to him for Christmas (every year!), and he's been looking forward to it. He and I just started watching the new Reacher show on Amazon Prime, and we are both (one fan of the books and one who's never read them) enjoying it so far.

 

Now, Ken is reading Countdown City by Ben Winters, book two of The Last Policeman series. I got him started on this series last year and gave him this book for Christmas. The series is about Detective Hank Palace, a committed police officer who is still doing his job, in spite of impending doom. An asteroid will hit Earth in 77 days, ending our world, but Hank is investigating the disappearance of a man (in a world where many people are disappearing now). Sounds so good! He's enjoying it.

 

Our son, 27, is still reading Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook, book one in the series of the same name. He says it's a series he's been wanting to read for years, and he spotted it in our local second-hand bookstore last year. He's enjoying it!

Just one extra blog post last month:

Fiction Review: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury - a brilliant collection of short stories that are creative, clever, and thought-provoking.

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?