It's Monday 7/31! What Are You Reading?

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

I have a lot to catch up on today! I missed last Monday because we got home from a camping trip Monday evening last week and left again for a family wedding Friday morning. We just got home last night, and my husband and I are looking forward to some boring time at home for a few weeks! 

Last weekend, we went camping in northeastern Pennsylvania with our two grown sons and one of their girlfriends. This was the first time our sons had joined us for a camping trip since ... 2019? It's been years. Since they grew up camping (we have a pop-up trailer) and enjoyed our annual three-week-long road trips every summer, they both loved getting out there again with us. And the girlfriend enjoyed it, too, so that's a win! We really lucked out with the weather: a few days of cooler temperatures in between two long bouts of heat and humidity. A few highlights:

Enjoying a campfire with my son and his girlfriend

Family hike!

Outstanding read!

Beautiful day for kayaking on Lackawanna Lake

All together :)

This past weekend, we got in the car again for a longer trip back to my hometown (Rochester, NY) for my cousin Bob's wedding. He and his new wife are in their early 60's and this was a first wedding for both of them, so it was a very happy occasion! We stayed with my step-mom and always enjoy our time with her. The wedding and reception were held on Saturday, and we had a great time with my family. My big triumph was being able to dance a little! With my chronic illness, any kind of exercise/exertion makes me worse--and my medications are wearing off by evening--but I managed 40 minutes on the dance floor with my husband and my family, dancing to fun 60's and 70's classics. I was the only one out there wearing a mask and a heart rate monitor, and I was careful not to raise my arms, but we had a blast. I so enjoyed that  and didn't have too much payback the next day (I slept in the car)--a big victory for me! 

Playing cards with my step-mom

 

My husband and I

My cousin & his beautiful bride!

My family at the wedding

Oh, and we celebrated my 58th birthday while we were camping! My family spoiled me with piles of gifts, including LOTS of books! I'll be posting a Birthday Book Haul video this week.

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On the Blog

I managed a few reviews, in between our travels:

Movie Monday: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - good old-fashioned fun, with plenty of adventure, suspense, action, and humor. 

Teen/YA Review: Scythe by Neal Schusterman - another outstanding dystopian novel from this talented author - my husband is reading it now, and I can't wait to read the next two books in the trilogy!

Fiction Review: Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat - I enjoyed this beautiful novel across time and place, interweaving four stories centered on nature, from 1732 to present day.

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On Video

Mid-Year Freak-Out Book Tag - a fun set of questions about what I've read so far this year

Friday Reads 7-28-23 - last week's brief discussion of what I'm currently reading 

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 What We're Reading

We are still enjoying my annual Big Book Summer Challenge, and all of the books below count as Big Books for the challenge, with 400 or more pages. There's still more than a month to go in the challenge, if you want to join the fun!

 

For the past two weeks, I have been reading--and loving--The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I last read it in 10th grade (my 40th high school reunion is this fall, so ... yeah, a long time ago!). This book has just been blowing me away from the first chapters. Tom Joad comes home from prison to his family's small sharecropper cabin in Oklahoma to find the house empty and knocked off its foundation. The Joad family--along with hundreds of thousands of other farming families during the Dust Bowl in the 1930's--has been kicked off their land and forced to pack all of their possessions (plus twelve people!) into a homemade truck and head west. They've heard there is farm work in California, so they and the rest of the new migrant class follow the rumors. Steinbeck has written the novel so cleverly: it is both the intimate portrait of this one family, that you get to know well here, and also the story of an entire population in this place and time. It's a gripping novel, and I am loving every minute of it.

 

I started two new Big Book audios in the last two weeks: one for myself and one with my husband in the car. Together, we are listening to First Cut by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell, book one in a mystery/thriller series about Jessie Teska, a young medical examiner. In the prologue, Jessie is working in L.A. County and a body shows up on her table that shocks her so much, she leaves her job. A few months later, as this novel opens, Jessie has accepted a new job in San Francisco, so she can be near her brother. Among some of the more mundane cases, Jessie catches a homicide during her first week, involving drug dealers and multiple bullets. Later, a drug mule shows up on her table, and then a presumed accidental overdose case that Jessie has questions about. As the bodies pile up, and her supervisors push her to close cases, Jessie continues to investigate this increasingly dangerous set of cases. This has been a great, suspenseful audiobook for our long car trips, but we still have a few chapters left!

 

On my own, I have been listening to The Secrets Between Us by Thrity Umrigar, a sequel to The Space Between Us, which I read back in 2009 (review at the link) and my entire book group enjoyed. The second book picks up right where the first book left off, and the focus here is on Bhima, the servant from the first book. Bhima is no longer working for Sera but is determined to find a way to support her granddaughter, Maya, so that she can graduate from college, have a better life, and escape the slums. A new character is introduced in this novel, Parvati, an older woman who is struggling with serious medical issues and homelessness. Just as with the first book, the narrative immediately pulled me into the story, and I am completely engrossed.

 

My husband, Ken, finished reading A Time for Mercy by John Grisham, book 3 in the Jake Brigance series, which I gave him for Father's Day. We both loved the first two books featuring Jake, A Time to Kill and Sycamore Row, and Ken said this was another good one. I want to read it, too! Now, Ken has moved onto one of my recent reads, Scythe by Neal Scusterman (my review at the link). He and I and our son all loved Schusterman's Unwind dystology, and Scythe creates a wholly different future world, where life is ideal and humans are immortal. There is no more disease; injuries are healed by nanites in the bloodstream; even middle seats on airplanes have been abolished! But, in a world where everyone is immortal, there must be a way to control population, so certain people are chosen to be scythes who will glean (i.e. kill) enough people to balance things out and keep population steady. The focus in this first novel is on two teens chosen to be scythe apprentices. It's a suspenseful page-turner with Schusterman's usual thought-provoking insights into human nature and "perfect" societies.

 

 

 

Our son has been very busy with work, but reading is how he relaxes. He's still enjoying book 10, Necromancer, of the Spellmonger series by Terry Mancour.

 

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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?