It's Monday 5/8! What Are You Reading?

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Happy Monday! I am catching up on real life (and resting) after another fabulous Booktopia weekend in beautiful Manchester, Vermont, at the Northshire Bookstore.

 

Booktopia is a very unique book event held every year on the first weekend in May. This year, it included 83 attendees (readers), 9 authors, and a bunch of Northshire booksellers. The weekend began Friday morning with recommendations from the booksellers that expanded everyone's TBR lists! Author sessions ran Friday afternoon and all day Saturday. Lots of the attendees try to read some of the books ahead of time, so these author talks are more like book group discussions with the author than your typical author reading. We heard all about what was behind each book, how the author created it, and we asked lots of questions! The authors are always amazed--and thrilled--by the depth of the questions Booktopians ask.

 

Me with author Annie Hartnett

Author Richard Mirabella

Friday evening included a big dinner for the whole crowd (authors and readers) with a Yankee Book Swap and some fun rounds of book trivia. My team (The Lit Ladies) started out hot, but the questions got a lot more difficult!

Our team's book trivia answers

My mom and I & two good friends with our swap books!

 

And Saturday evening, each author gives a quick 10-minute talk to the entire group--that session is open to the public.

Author Brianna Holt

Plus, there was delicious food and amazing conversations with so many great people! This was the sixth year that my mom and I attended Booktopia. Some people have been going every year since the first one, in 2011, and there are always new people there who soon become fans. It was so wonderful to reconnect with old friends and to meet new ones. Book people are the best!

Mom and I at our 6th Booktopia!

 

The 10-hour travel days there and back were a lot for me (traffic was horrible around NYC last night), but it's worth it. Every author who attends says, "This is such a unique and wonderful event!" I will be putting together my Booktopia Wrap-Up Vlog tomorrow, so look for that on my YouTube channel, with more photos, lots of video clips, and an overview of the books & authors featured.

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On the Blog

I managed to get two posts up before I left last week:

TV Tuesday: Somebody Somewhere - this fabulous show that its cast calls "quietly subversive" is hilariously funny and full of heart.

Teen/YA Review: This Is Our Place by Vitor Martins - I loved this unique YA novel on audio set in Brazil about 3 different teens in 3 decades, each living in the same house.  

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On Video

Just one video posted before my trip, but I also learned how to make video shorts (under 1 min) and posted a couple of pre-Booktopia shorts:

Video: April Reading Wrap-Up

Short: Preparing for Booktopia (traveling with chronic illness)

Short: Booktopia 2023: Vermont or Bust!

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What We're Reading

I finished my last Booktopia selection, The Love Scribe by Amy Meyerson. Alice and Gabby have been best friends since they were young and love to write letters to each other. When Gabby is struggling after a bad break-up, Alice sits down to write to her and has a sudden vision of a red hummingbird. A beautiful short story pours out of her that she gives to her friend. While Gabby is reading the story in a bar, she meets a wonderful man. Gabby passes the story onto her sister and some friends, and the same thing happens to them: they each fall in love. It seems that Alice may have a special gift, as she stumbles onto a new calling as a love scribe. I'm not usually into magical realism, but I ended up enjoying this. I liked it better as things began to go wrong, and the story became more complex. I both listened on audio and read it in print, so I could finish it in time for Booktopia!

 

With a book group meeting quickly approaching on Wednesday, I'm doing the same thing (audio and print) with another novel, The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate. My book group previously read--and loved--Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours. This is another historical fiction book that spans both past and present. In Louisiana in 1875, a former slave named Hannie is now 18 years old and wants to find her family. Her mother, aunt, and eight siblings were each sold off separately in Louisiana and Texas during the war, when Hannie was just six years old. She's the only one that ended up back on their home plantation. In 1987, Bennie Silva is a first-year high school English teacher in that same town, struggling to engage the kids in her classes, who are distracted by extreme poverty, family members in prison, and other daily struggles. These stories in two different time periods are gradually coming together. The "lost friends" of the title were real-life letters published in a southern church newspaper from enslaved people searching for their families, and Wingate has included these real (and very moving) letters throughout the narrative. I'm completely engrossed in this excellent book.

 

My husband, Ken, is still reading the book I gave him for Easter, Armada by Ernest Cline (author of the fabulous Ready Player One and its sequel, Ready Player Two). This is an earlier novel, where a teen obsessed with video games witnesses a real alien invasion--sounds like a lot of fun, with Cline's trademark humor woven in. 

Our son, 28, might still be reading book 4, The Tunnels Beneath, of The Aldoran Chronicles by Michael Wiseheart. I didn't get a chance to talk to him this weekend, but I know his new job is keeping him very busy. We'll be seeing him next weekend!

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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?