It's Monday 7/8! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Last week was a busy catch-up week after our week spent camping and traveling–and even busier since it was such a short week, with the holiday!

Tuesday, I took my elderly Book Buddy (library program, though we’ve become good friends) out to lunch and the library. She always enjoys riding in my convertible! And I got an overdue haircut Wednesday. 

Since Thursday, our weather has been intolerably hot and humid (temps in the high 90′s), so we enjoyed the 4th of July in an air-conditioned movie theater, with meal service and recliner seats! We saw A Quiet Place: Day One, which was just as wonderful as the first two Quiet Place movies. I’ll try to write a review later today.

On Friday, we attended the retirement party of one of our oldest and dearest friends. We’ve known her and her husband since our days together in New Orleans in the 80′s and have been together through every stage of life, so we enjoyed celebrating this latest milestone with her. 

Very early Saturday morning, my husband left on his annual road trip to his hometown in Oklahoma to play golf with his two closest high school friends for a week. He’s really been looking forward to this (arrived last night–a much faster rate of travel than we can manage when I’m along!). As for me, I am thoroughly enjoying some quiet solitude. I got a lot done this weekend, cleared some clutter, and enjoyed some downtime. I have plans with several friends this week, and our son will be home (at least briefly) tonight.

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On the Blog

Fiction Review: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – I loved this incredible epic adventure novel with so much emotional depth–I laughed, I cried, I thoroughly enjoyed every one of its 850 pages!

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Travel & Camping Vlog – Hickory Run State Park and Jim Thorpe, PA – photos and videos from our recent 5-day camping trip to this beautiful state park, including a visit to the historic town of Jim Thorpe and a ride on a scenic railroad.

Friday Reads 7-5-24 – my brief weekly update of what I am reading and listening to – a catch-up on 4 excellent books this week for #BigBookSummer Challenge.

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After finally finishing Lonesome Dove, I moved onto a “smaller” #BigBookSummer selection, The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley. This is another book I’ve been wanting to read, after hearing so many rave reviews. Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in Sault Saint Marie and has always felt pulled between two different worlds: her mother’s white family with French origins and her father’s indigenous family and community, which is a large part of the local region. She and her best friend, Lily, have just graduated from high school and are looking forward to starting at the local college in the fall. Daunis is also an outstanding hockey player, playing on the boys’ team in high school, in this Canadian border town where hockey is king. However, all is not right in Daunis’ world. Her uncle recently died, her grandmother had a stroke and is in a nursing home, and there is evidence all around that drugs–particularly meth–are having a devastating effect on her community. While Daunis and the local native culture are at the center of this novel, it also has mystery/thriller elements. I’m loving it so far.

Just last night, I finished my latest Big Book on audio, Mr. Nice Guy by Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer, a wife-husband writing team. Lucas gave up law school, a fiancee (though technically, she gave him up), and his small southern town to chase his dream of living in the Big Apple. He got a job as a fact-checker at Empire, the glossy magazine that has long fed his visions of an exciting life in New York. One night, he meets an attractive woman named Carmen and goes home with her, feeling like his big city life is finally starting. But the next week, he discovers–as does the rest of the city–that he has actually slept with the Carmen Kelly, his own magazine’s sex columnist, and she has written a scathing review of their night together that’s gone viral, referring to him as Mr. Nice Guy and emphasizing his inexperience. Lucas writes a furious (and anonymous) rebuttal that the magazine also publishes, and suddenly, all anyone is talking about is their budding (and doomed?) relationship. It’s fun and smart, with a he said-she said approach (in the audio, the authors each read their own character’s columns), but it also had surprising emotional depth, addressed some difficult topics, and was about much more than sex. I really enjoyed it. Now I need to pick my next audio!

When my husband, Ken, left, he was reading Big Time by Ben H. Winters, one of our favorite authors who wrote The Last Policeman trilogy. This is a sci fi thriller about a dark conspiracy to harvest and sell people’s time, extracted like organs for transplant. Sounds like an intriguing concept, and I know it must be gripping and fast-paced because Ken was already two-thirds of the way through the novel in less than a week. I doubt if he’ll have much reading time this week!

Our son, 29, might be still reading book 2 of the Licanius Trilogy by James Islington, An Echo of Things to Come since he started a new job two weeks ago! He’s enjoying this one, but he won’t have a lot of reading time now. And I need to adjust to the fact that I can’t text him for a reading update on Monday morning anymore because he’s at work! I did talk to him several times last week but forgot to get a book update. He’s loving the new job so far.

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