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Life
Wow, how is it the end of August already? Coming home after almost six weeks on the road has felt like a kind of time warp! I'm very glad to have missed the extreme heat and humidity here for most of the summer (and we lucked out with an unusually cool period the past week). It was so lovely up north, in Montana, Canada, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, with highs usually in the 70's and beautifully cool nights.
But, we came home in mid-August, and our calendar still said June! Last week was mostly a hectic catch-up week: finishing the laundry, cleaning, repairing & cleaning the camper, replacing our cracked windshield (a victim of the 6000-mile road trip), catching up on my YouTube channel, and starting to reweed the garden beds that I left beautifully weeded and mulched!
It was also moving week for our son and his girlfriend, who have a new townhouse, which is closer to us than their old apartment. They invited us for dinner last night, and we had a wonderful time: delicious food, a beautiful new home, and great company!
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I added 2 last videos to my Montana/Canada Trip Playlist:
Montana Road Trip Days 30-33: Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Wisconsin - Come along to this beautiful, unique place on Lake Superior. I included some footage of us kayaking through sea caves and on a boat tour at sunset. Stunning scenery!
Montana Road Trip, Days 34-37: Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Cleveland, and Home! - We enjoyed our last days on the road in the gorgeous UP of Michigan, staying overnight lakeside, with a stop in Cleveland to visit old friends and see the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Friday Reads 8-22-25: Reading for #BigBookSummer and YA'ugust - We're enjoying some great novels!
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We finished watching Grosse Pointe Garden Society, and we really enjoyed this dark comedy murder mystery. It's got a great ensemble cast, about a garden club in a wealthy suburb where four of the members get entangled in a grisly murder. In the very first episode, you see the four friends burying someone wrapped in a blanket at the big end-of-season gala, but you don't know who it is or exactly what happened. The show moves back and forth between the past year and the present day, gradually filling in the gaps, not only about the crime but also about each of the main characters and all that leads up to the big night. There are plenty of red herrings and lots of suspense, but also great character development, and we enjoyed it.
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Remember that Big Book Summer ends on September 1! If you're participating, you can (if you want to) update what Big Books you read in our Goodreads or Storygraph groups or on your blog or YouTube channel.
I am loving The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a book I have wanted to read since its release in 2021. In fact, it was THE hot book of Big Book Summer a few years ago. At 816 pages, it definitely qualifies! It's my neighborhood book group's pick for our September book. It's a complex retracing of a woman's (Ailey Pearl Garfield) heritage and ancestors, starting with a Creek woman in the 1600's, a mixed-race Black man, and a Scottish immigrant in what will become Georgia, eventually mixing in other Native Americans, a girl stolen from Ghana and sold into slavery, and many others. There are threads of the story that started in the 1600's and in the 1970's that are each moving forward and gradually filling in the blanks. The writing is beautiful (Jeffers is a poet), and the characters are vivid and engaging. It's absolutely compelling and immersive; I've been staying up much too late each night reading! I'm pretty certain I won't finish it by September 1, to count for Big Book Summer, but I'm glad to finally be reading this highly acclaimed novel.
On audio, I finally finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky! I started it at the beginning of June, though I didn't have time to listen much on our trip. It's a character study of three Russian brothers and their scoundrel father who abandoned them as children. The novel includes a murder mystery and courtroom drama, though the murder doesn't occur until about 2/3 of the way through, so it's a long set-up. Readers know that the accused brother did not actually kill their father but not who the real killer is. It's very long, very dense, and has lots of tangents (to build the characters), but I'm glad to have finally read a Dostoevsky novel.
After finishing that, I jumped into another very BIG book on audio, The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. This is another highly acclaimed novel that was a very popular Big Book Summer pick a few years ago. I enjoyed his Cutting for Stone. This novel is set mostly in India and follows multiple characters, beginning in 1900. It's a complex story of places and times and people, following one Indian family, a Scottish doctor in India, and other characters. Interestingly (and probably because I started them within days of each other), I am seeing parallels to The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois, tracing family history, going back more than a century, addressing issues like slavery and the caste system, and with deep emotional depth and character development. I sometimes struggle with keeping track of the Indian names on audio, but I am fully engrossed in the story and enjoying it.
My husband finished The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis (and enjoyed it) and is now reading The Splinter Effect by Andrew Ludington, a book I gave him for Father's Day. I chose this time travel thriller based solely on the shelf tag and recommendation of a Northshire Bookstore bookseller while I was at Booktopia in May. It's about an archeologist who time travels in order to study various places and buildings when they were built and/or used. He lost both an artifact and his mentee in time, and the story revolves around that. It sounds great to me, and I'm sure I will be reading it myself!
Our son, 31, finished rereading the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks, an old favorite of his, in preparation for the latest book. He is now reading the surprise 4th book (it was supposed to be a trilogy), Night Angel Nemesis.
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What are you and your family reading this week?
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