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| Hosted by The Book Date |
Life
Whew, last week was a hectic, packed-full week ... and it did me in! I had appointments and meetings (book group 😀) every single day, which is more than I can usually handle. Plus, two of my appointments involved considerable pain (podiatrist and orthodontist), and I think that pushed me over the edge. By Thursday evening, I was "crashed" (chronic illness flare-up) for the first time in many months. I took it easy Friday on the couch and was feeling better by Saturday, thankfully.
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| Final set of retainers - very painful at first! |
Our older son came to visit over the weekend, and we really enjoyed catching up with him and spending some relaxing time together. We celebrated his birthday (a month late), took a walk at our local nature center which sparked lots of fun childhood memories, and Saturday evening, our younger son and his girlfriend joined us for dinner and a campfire. So happy to have them both home! Lots of laughs this weekend together.
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| Our son loved his boxed set of JRR Tolkien! |
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Great walk at our nature center on a beautiful day! |
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| Up in his favorite childhood tree (he said it's easier to climb now!) |
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| Love having our family together! |
Yesterday morning, he drove back to New York, my husband met our younger son for golf, and I enjoyed a quiet, productive Sunday at home.
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| Ahhh! Relaxing Sunday morning on the porch. |
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Childhood Books Tag - I had so much fun recording this tag video and reminiscing about my favorite childhood books Definitely check this out if you're a child of the 70's!
Friday Reads 9-12-25: RIP Reading, Shorty September & Year of Reading Ghost Stories - My weekly reading update of what my family and I have been reading and listening to - a lot more books now that I've moved from Big Book Summer to Shorty September!
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Ballard - We just finished the first season of this novel adaptation last night, and it was excellent! My husband and I are both big fans of Michael Connelly's thriller novels, and the TV adaptations are always outstanding. We enjoy watching The Lincoln Lawyer and loved Bosch, which wrapped up a few years ago. Bosch: Legacy is a sequel to Bosch, as his daughter joins the LAPD and Bosch himself retires (but is still doing private PI work). Ballard is an adaptation of Connelly's newest series featuring female LAPD detective Rene Ballard, as she teams up with Bosch to solve cold cases. The first season was great, with an excellent cast and lots of suspense. ALL of these shows are worth watching! (links go to my reviews of the TV shows/books).
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I finished reading Desert Places by Blake Crouch. My husband and I are big fans of Crouch's novels and TV shows (he's a screenwriter, too). We both love his sci fi thrillers, including Recursion, Upgrade, and my favorite, Dark Matter, which was adapted into an excellent TV series on Apple. He also helped adapt and co-create the TV series Wayward Pines and Good Behavior, based on his novels and novellas, which we also enjoyed. This is one of his earlier novels, a short thriller about a man named Andrew who writes thrillers about murderers and serial killers. He's just sent the last revisions of his latest book to his editor when he receives a strange and frightening letter. It tells him that there's a dead woman buried on his property who was killed with his own kitchen knife and has his blood on her. The letter writer says he will tell the police where to find the body and who the "killer" is, unless Andrew does exactly as he says. He also threatens Andrew's mother, with details that make Andrew know he's serious. What follows is a terrifying period of time in which Andrew ends up in a remote desert cabin with a serial killer. It's a great set-up and is loaded with tension and suspense and plenty of twists! It was violent and a bit graphic for my taste but a gripping thriller that I read quickly (and it's the start of a trilogy).
I also read a Nancy Drew book, The Mystery at Lilac Inn by Carolyn Keene. It was so much fun to return to this childhood favorite! I hadn't read one since I was a kid. This was #4 in the series, and my mom gave me an antique copy years ago that was published in 1930. I hadn't realized that the publishers updated them over the years so that by the 1970's when I was reading them, Nancy was driving a blue convertible (here, it's a roadster). I looked up a photo of a 1930 roadster, and it kind of blew my mind! This made me realize that these novels for young girls were really ahead of their time, featuring such a smart, independent teen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and in the end, Nancy came out of it safely and solved the mystery!
Next, I will probably read one of the short stories from The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Newton. This is a year-long read-along with the Book Cougars podcast, whose theme for this year is ghost stories. They've been reading and discussing one story each month, but I fell way behind this summer, so I'm catching up.
On audio, I listened to another readalong for the Book Cougars podcast, the short story The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. This was a fun one, with Wilde's usual sense of humor. An American family moves to England when the husband/father is assigned as U.S. Minister there. They buy a house that has been haunted by a ghost for hundreds of years. The ghost tries his best to scare them, but they are too modern and practical for that, and they thwart his efforts at every turn. It was very funny and amusing. I'm looking forward to their discussion of it.
Next, I listened to Unauthorized Bread by Cory Doctorow (who is apparently no relation to E.L. Doctorow). This is a novella, perfect for Shorty September, that depicts a near-future dystopia that is easy to imagine. In this AI-controlled Boston, technology rules everyone's lives. Salima, a young Syrian who has lived most of her life in refugee camps, gets approved for an apartment in a swanky high-tech building. But the appliances are all owned and run by big corporations, so residents can only use authorized supplies in them (hence, the title). When the companies fail altogether and the appliances on the "poor floors" all stop working, Salima goes on the dark web, learns how to jailbreak the appliances, and becomes a hero to her neighbors. She even trains a group of kids on the poor floors to help her free the other residents from the tyranny of the tech. When the companies are pulled out of bankruptcy and restarted, Salima and the kids are at great risk for what they've done. It's a great story with lots of warmth, a sense of humor, and social justice you'll cheer for!
And Libby returned the audio of The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese to my iPod! Yay! I'm happy to be back in the world of this fabulous multi-generational novel set in India (and Libby even remembered where I was).
My husband, Ken is reading The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, a Booktopia author this year. I enjoyed this suspenseful literary thriller this spring. It’s about an author who steals the plot idea of one of his former students who died. The novel is a huge success, and he thinks he got away with it (though is going crazy worrying he’ll be found out) when he gets a message saying someone knows he’s a thief. Even when you think you have this book figured out, it keeps surprising you! It's super twisty! Ken commented to me last night that it was a long build-up, but I know he'll love it when those surprises start coming.
Our son, 31, was here this weekend and got some new books for his birthday! He finished reading the surprise 4th book, Night Angel Nemesis, in Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy and is looking forward to another from that author. He was excited that we gave him The Light of All That Falls by James Islington, book 3 in the Licanius trilogy, but he said he will probably reread book 2, An Echo of Things to Come, first.
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What are you and your family reading this week?
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