It's Monday 2/21! What Are You Reading?

Hosted by The Book Date

Hope everyone is doing well on this Monday morning. Happy President's Day in the U.S.!

Just more of the same here ... my father-in-law is out of the hospital and back in the nursing home. It turned out he was mostly severely dehydrated and malnourished. Now that he's back, we fear he will go down that path again. My husband and I (and our son, when he's here) visit every day, mostly at meal times, to encourage him to eat and drink more, but they still have him on a pureed diet, which is really gross! We requested a care meeting for tomorrow with staff to help them understand his needs better. We want to get him back on real foods, back to PT, and out of bed for a while each day. It's been very frustrating to get all that across and also heartbreaking to see him declining so.

And that's really all that's going on in our lives! We are singularly focused these days on caring for him, visiting, and getting him the care he needs. My husband and son worked this weekend on starting to move all his stuff out of his assisted living apartment. Our house is now packed full with all of his stuff, plus all of our son's stuff, plus all that's accumulated in the past 27 years!

I did manage to upload one new video last week, my weekly reading update:

Friday Reads 2-18-22

And I have one other fun video that I will edit and upload early this week.

Oh, and I finished all of my January reviews. You can watch my video January Reading Wrap-Up where talk about each of the six books I read last month. Since I'm not doing monthly summaries here on the blog anymore, I thought I'd give you a quick run-down on how I did on my reading challenges last month:

Mount TBR Challenge - Only 2 of my 6 were from my own shelves - need to up my game!

Monthly Motif Challenge - January was New To You and I read Janesville by Amy Goldstein, a new-to-me author.

Back to the Classics 2022 - I got a head start with a classic in January! The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury counted for a classic short story collection.

Alphabet Soup Challenge - I filled in B, H, I, J, M, and S - all unique letters!

Nonfiction Reader Challenge - Kicked off the new year with 2 nonfiction books, in the Science and Economics categories.

Diversity Challenge - Great start! Five of my six books were diverse.

Travel the World in Books - I visited India, Ghana, UK, and ... Mars and Venus!

Literary Escapes Challenge - I got 3 M's: Maryland, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, plus Wisconsin.

 

Here's what we've all been reading this past week. I continued my focus on Black History Month:

 

I quickly finished Ruby Lee and Me by Shannon Hitchcock, a middle-grade novel that I really enjoyed. 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. She 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; it's excellent on all counts.

 

And then, I finally got to read Kindred by Octavia Butler. Wow. Completely blew me away!! Twenty-six-year-old Dana, a Black woman in 1976 California, suddenly and inexplicably finds herself in 1815 North Carolina on a slave plantation. She's on a riverbank and sees a child drowning in the water, so she swims out to save him, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the banks to revive him, before his mother sees her and begins beating on her, not understanding what she's doing. In an instant, Dana is back in 1976, wet and muddy and shaking, telling her white husband, Kevin, what just happened. Dana is transported back to the plantation many times to save the boy, Rufus, but sometimes her stays are much longer, like one lasting eight months. Experiencing the life of a slave on a plantation first-hand, through Dana's narrative, is moving, powerful, and sometimes devastating. I came to care about all of the characters and read way too late every night. I could barely set this book down--why did I wait so long to read it?

 

I finally finished an audiobook that fit 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 second half, after he moves to Chicago and gets involved in communism, was less engrossing for me but still interesting. The audio is excellent, and hearing the author's words from a first-person perspective is especially evocative and powerful. I need to choose my next audio!

 

My husband, Ken, just finished 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 really enjoying this series, and I want to read it, too.

 

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. When he was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he explained to me that this volume actually contains the first several books in the series, so it's a whopper!

 

Blog posts last week:

Movie Monday: Honey Boy - highly rated, entertaining & moving portrayal of a child actor, written by and starring Shia LeBeouf and based on his life.

Fiction Review: Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh - People's lives intersect around a women's clinic, by one of my favorite authors.

Middle-Grade Review: Marshmallow and Jordan by Alina Chau - graphic novel about a disabled middle-grade girl, with gorgeous watercolor illustrations that bring Indonesia to life on the page.

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?