It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Today I get to start two new books and I don't know what they will be yet. I finished Marcus Sedgwick's Mister Memory, a book about a man with a perfect memory accused of a murder in late 19th century Paris, as well as Osamu Tezuka's epic manga series Buddha. Buddha was incredible, the kind of reading experience I will return to again and again. 

So that knocks off my novel-in-hand and my bedside graphica/nonfiction. Buddha was like part true story, part apocrypha and legend, part imagination.

I have a lot to choose from on my TBR shelves.

That said, I'm still working on listening to Liza Mundy's wonderful Code Girls, about women who broke codes for the US during World War 2. 

I'm also reading Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. It's my San Francisco-history selection for this year and it's fascinating and fun. There is some skimming involved- I'm not gonna lie- because the nuts-and-bolts rock stuff is not 100% my thing. I'm more in it for the California history than the plate tectonics. But it's accessible enough.

But I need some new fiction. I'm thinking I might reread Patrick Dewitt's wonderful The Sisters Brothers, since there is a movie coming out in the fall, or Nathacha Appanah's new book, Waiting for Tomorrow, or maybe Tommy Orange's well-received There There. Or, I did pick up Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, which got a good write up in the Times.

What do you suggest? I probably already have it on my shelves lol. 

Some Favorite Books by Immigrants

Photo by Tony Webster. CC License

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, and the whole Ibis Trilogy including River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The series, by Indian-born Ghosh, details the lives and fortunes of a panoply of characters during the first Opium Wars and takes place on the seas and shores of India and China. It's a breathtaking epic.

The Patriots, by Sana Krasikov. Ukrainian by birth, Krasikov has long been on my list of writers to watch. The Patriots is her first novel and covers the life of an American who travels to Russia only to get caught up in Stalinism and the shifting sands of the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

Hild, by Nicola Griffith. British Griffith was mainly known as a science fiction/fantasy writer before producing this vivid and engrossing historical fiction about a young woman in the England of swords and castles. It's an incredible coming of age story about an extraordinary person.

American Gypsy, by Oksana Marafioti. Russian-born and part Roma, Marafioti wrote this memoir about growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s. It's charming and bittersweet, full of detail and emotion. I enjoyed it on several levels and highly recommend it.

Before Night Falls, by Reinaldo Arenas. Cuban dissident Arenas wrote this memoir to document his life and the struggles he endured as his country changed around him. It's an incredibly moving and life-affirming work.

Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show, by Frank Delaney. Irish-born Delaney started a trilogy with this book, about a man's search for his lost love. It's funny and emotional and just plain delightful.

Pushkin Hills, by Sergei Dovlatov. Jewish/Armenian Russian-born Dovlatov eventually settled in the Rego Park neighborhood of Queens, but not before penning this absurdist and wonderful novel about a poet working at a tourist resort and all of his daily travails. I love this book so much.

A Mountain of Crumbs, by Elena Gorokhova. Russian-born Gorokhova wrote this book about her childhood and growing realization that she needed to leave her homeland for greater opportunities in America. She draws a detailed picture of the struggles and deprivations of 1970s Soviet life, and also some of its joys.

Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah. South African, biracial and a polyglot, comedian Noah wrote a moving, funny and insightful book about his family and his country. The more I learn about South Africa the less I feel like I know and Noah's book brought out more dimensions to explore.

A Quick Visit to Disney World

So last month I had the chance to visit Disney World for three days. I'll never be one to turn down a chance to hang out with Mickey at the Magic Kingdom, so even though it was short notice and a short trip, of course I jumped.

My husband and I had talked about doing a "seat of the pants" Disney trip with minimal work ahead of time and few frills- we wouldn't be staying on property,  leave the pin lanyards and autograph book at home, and we wouldn't be doing any fancy dining. I learned that while you can get away without the kind of big planning I did for our 2015 trip, at a minimum you need to pick a park to visit each day, book FastPasses at the 30 day mark and think about a meal or two you'd really like to have. Not too much to worry about.

This stuff saved my bacon for four days outside in the Orlando sun. No joke.

What that did mean was me waking up at 4am one day when I was in California because that was the 30 day mark for one of our park days.  FastPass reservations open at 7am and that means 7am Eastern Standard Time, or very very early California time. I can't say I was happy about the early reveille but what can you do. The Mouse requires some sacrifices.

That being said, this little bit of effort went a long way. We got FastPasses for our favorite rides and even got a breakfast reservation at Kona Cafe, one of my favorite places to eat at WDW, and a dinner there a couple of days later. A good breakfast is essential to take on the Magic Kingdom and the Poly starts any day off right. While we were in Florida we managed to book a nice dinner at Disney Springs for our last night as well.

Yes I drank this entire French Press of Kona coffee on my first day.

Speaking of the Polynesian resort, we used Lyft quite a bit to get around Orlando used the Polynesian resort as our base. This tactic worked well because it was much easier to find our pickup at the resort versus the Magic Kingdom, which is always swamped with ride sharers. I had mixed results with Lyft; some drivers were great and knew their way around while others- well, I think some folks maybe were just new to Orlando and concepts like Disney and SeaWorld proved challenging.  But everyone was courteous and friendly.

But I would definitely recommend Lyft to get around Orlando if you're not staying on property. Disney has its own Lyft-affiliated ride sharing service called Minnie Vans that while pricier than a regular Lyft, includes perks like insider Disney tips from the cast members who drive the vans. Anyone can use the Minnie Vans with the My Disney Experience app.

Please take that advice that has you baking in the sun all day so I can have the park to myself at night.

One big improvement in My Disney Experience over our last trip is that the app now lets you order food online for pickup at some quick-service dining locations. This functionality helped shorten line time and wait time during our visit to the land of Pandora at Animal Kingdom and I wished I'd known about it earlier in our trip. You can also split up Fast Pass parties now so you don't have to do everything with your group.

My overall takeaway from this trip can be summed up in five words: Visit the Parks at Night. I don't care what anyone says about rope drop and how it's essential you get to the parks when they open. But hey. If you listen to that advice and bake all day in sun, I can have short lines and more fun at night. Because OMG Disney is like a carnival at night. It's beautiful and lit up, you get fireworks, you get cooler temperatures and you get a full day's worth of fun if you get there around 3-4pm and go until it closes or you drop. Get your FastPasses for between 3-6pm, do indoor rides while it's still hot and sunny and then play outside until 11pm or later. Shop, get ice creams, go on rides and just generally rock the park at night. I will never go for rope drop again.

June Reading Wrap-Up

In the month of June I covered four states- Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. Through Bread Loaf, a quilting retreat, Disney and a few days here and there at home I always brought my books along. Always the same books, because I was busy and didn't have a lot to read, but always with the books.

In May I was in California and picked up Her Mother's Mother's Mother & Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira. It's a kind of history of Brazil told through a multigenerational story of the women of a family that starts with first contact between indigenous people and the Portuguese and continues to the modern era. It's a series of interrelated character sketches, heavy on exposition and light on an overall narrative apart from the narrative of Brazil and its growth and development. I started it in a hotel in SF and finished it at a hotel in Orlando about a month later. It was a wonderful travel companion. Translated from the Portuguese.

Hideo Yokoyama's crime drama Six Four was a long long book but ultimately rewarding. It's not so much a crime novel as a novel about crime if that makes sense. Mikami, a police press spokesman, tries to wrangle police department politics alongside an unofficial investigation into an unsolved killing while struggling to hold his marriage together after his own daughter disappears. I liked it but it was more character-driven than most crime novels. The characterizations were rich and what kept me reading was how involved I got with Mikami's point of view. Translated from the Japanese.

I finally read Niccolo Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared; he's one of my favorite writers; his books are just so uniformly good. He is particularly good at drawing young people and this book was as terrifying as it was mundane; a young boy out playing finds another boy, a kidnapped child being held prisoner by people who are closer to him than he thinks. Dealing with this secret occupies the majority of the book, which is slender and ends in tragedy. Translated from the Italian.

Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens, is coming out in August and has the potential to be a big book. It's both a long book and a gripping murder mystery. The mystery at its core isn't so much about the killing as it is about the protagonist, Kya Clark, a young woman growing up in isolation and ostracism in 1960s North Carolina. The narrative shifts between Kya's childhood and adolescence and later, the death of a man she knows. Owens plays with the reader's expectations in different ways and delivers a crazy-good read. Look for it soon.

I didn't finish any audiobooks in June but I probably will finish my current read, Code Girls, before the next month is out. I'll keep you posted!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's been a busy, topsy-turvy June but as we near July life is slowing down and I'm getting back to routine matters.

Over the last month I finished all the books I had going before and even started some new ones.

Mister Memory, by Marcus Sedgwick, is a novel set in late 19th century Paris, about a man named Marcel who arrives in Paris from the provinces with a prodigious talent- perfect recall. And it seems he's killed his wife, but things may not be as they seem. So far it's intriguing and light and fun, a novel about a mystery rather than a mystery novel.

My bedside read is Daša Drndić's Trieste, a novel about World War 2 set in northern Italy and environs.  I only just started it so I can't tell you too much right now.

I mentioned Code Girls on my Audiobook Roundup and I'm still loving this fascinating and detailed history of the women who helped win World War 2 (speaking of) by working as cryptanalysts for the US military.

Reviews in Brief, Audio Edition

I usually have an audiobook going these days, almost always nonfiction which I just find easier to process via my ears.

Look Alive Out There* is Sloane Crosley's latest; you might know her from her
2008 collection, I Was Told There'd Be Cake. I was not a huge fan of that book but I enjoyed it enough; the book struck me like a mash between Jen Lancaster and David Sedaris, or kind of a midway point. In Look Alive, Crosley seems older and wiser and the book strikes me as less fluffy overall but still funny and engrossing. As a background actor I enjoyed reading about her walk-on stint on "Gossip Girls" and as a New Yorker I appreciated stories about life in the West Village, about neighbors you know but don't know, and the sheer absurdity of living in the greatest city in the world. Look Alive is a terrific light read and the author's narration makes it fun.

Author narration of memoirs is something I like in general. Another good one is Jen Kirkman's I Know What I'm Doing- And Other Lies I Tell Myself, her latest about being single and middle aged and forging a life and career. I'm a fan of Kirkman's standup and found the book delightful. It picks up just after her divorce, which I gather she talked about in an earlier book, and details her life as a traveling comedian and smart woman in the world. I love her feminism and why-not approach to life. She's someone I'd love to get a glass of wine with and listening to her book was the next best thing.


Tiffany Haddish's The Last Black Unicorn* is a book I have complicated feelings about. On one level I thought it was terrific- engaging, funny and smart, Haddish has a lot to say. And her narration is like sitting next to her on a park bench and just listening to her talk. She is brutally honest about herself- I think. There was some controversy around the book initially, that she may have exaggerated or been pressured to change some of the stories about her relationship with her now ex-husband, and then I realized she cowrote the book with Tucker Max, himself no friend to women. So I don't know. I recommend the book and I basically loved it, but there are wrinkles I don't know how to work out.

Probably my overall favorite this year has been We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby. I want to be her friend. It will never happen, but I want to be her friend. Acerbic, brilliant and hilarious,
not to mention emotional and true, I loved this book so much. Irby's life is topsy-turvy and there is so much I could relate to, from the troubled relationship with parents to trying to fit into a bohemian-bourgeois adult life my childhood did nothing to train me for. And she is so funny.

Now I'm reading Liza Mundy's Code Girls*, which I'm
loving, about women who worked as cryptographers for the US military. The focus is on World War 2 but Mundy covers a lot of ground. And it doesn't hurt my interest level that many of these women were Wellesley and Seven Sisters grads and students. I shared the book with my alumnae book group on Facebook and heard a lot of positive feedback. I'm about 1/3 of the way through but it is one of those books that makes me seek out opportunities for long walks, just so I have time to listen.

My audio TBR consists of one big must-read, David Sedaris's new book Calypso*, and lots of other maybe-I'll-get-around-to-it titles. What are you listening to this summer? Let me know and I'll keep you posted in the meant time.


*FTC Disclosure: I received free, promotional copies from libro.fm of the audiobooks marked with an asterisk. I purchased the others.

Reviews in Brief

Since I evidently can't be bothered with full reviews these days (I haven't written one since October of last year) I'll catch you up on some reading in short form.

Mirror City, by Chitrita Banerji. Writer Chitrita Banerji resides in Cambridge,
Mass., but this book was published for the Indian market; I got a copy after it showed up as a consignment at my old workplace. It's good! It's about an Indian/Hindu woman married to a Muslim and living with him Bangladesh during the tumultuous political and social upheavals of the 1970s. Uma struggles to find a place for herself, establish a career and manage her relationship with her husband while negotiating some pretty tricky politics. I liked it a lot and would recommend it.

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. This won the Booker Prize a few years ago; it's a big, complex, sprawling historical novel set in New Zealand of the late19th century as gold prospectors mingle with misfits and tangle for money, love and power. It's hard work but worth it.

The Road Home, by Rose Tremain. Tremain's Orange-Prize-winning novel tells the story of Lev, an immigrant to London from an unnamed former Communist Eastern European country. The first few pages are claustrophobic as we follow Lev's first few days in detail; then the narrative opens up as he settles and starts to build a new life. Soon he finds a dream to chase and that's when things get really interesting. This timely and moving novel is well worth a read.

Escape from Camp 14, by Blaine Harden, is required reading about North Korea's human rights violations. Shin Dong-hyuk was born and raised in a secret labor camp and he barely escapes. Physically he leaves the camp but inside he struggles trying to adjust to Korean and American society. Both sides of the narrative are heart rending but it's important to not look away.

I have like five books going right now that I have been reading for a few weeks and it's been just as hard to write reviews as to finish books. I want to come up with a new format to talk about books, something that differs from the kinds of "reviews" I've been writing for almost eleven years now. What do you think of the capsule-type reviews above? Do you have any other suggestions? I'd love to get your help!

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive any of these books for review.

BEA Book Update

BEA, or Book Expo America, ran from May 30-June 1 this year in New York City. I was able to attend for a few hours on the morning on May 31and brought home just about as many books as I could carry.

The show floor was quietish although there were some A-list signings; I noticed Barbara Kingsolver, Nicholas Sparks, Andre Dubus III for example. I passed on the author breakfast, this year starring Trevor Noah and others.

The most exciting galleys I found were crime novels. Ed Lin's 99 Ways to Die (October) and John Straley's Baby's First Felony (July) will be the first up on my reading list. Both are from Soho Press.

The big "get" was Markus Zuzak's new book, his first since The Book Thief, Bridge of Clay (October). Galleys were numbered and you had to fill out a card telling him what The Book Thief meant to you. I just happened to be walking by the booth when there were still some left.

One of the other "it" books of the show is Tommy Orange's There There, out now from Knopf and looking great, a story about indigenous people in an urban setting.

I'm also excited about Europa Edition's new series-starter A Winter's Promise (October). It's also high on my list of translated books coming out this year, along with I Didn't Talk by Beatriz Bracher (July), coming from New Directions.

Who knew Frank Capra ever wrote a novel? Yes, that Frank Capra. It's called Cry Wilderness and is coming in September from Rare Bird Books.

I caught up with some friends too- I love wandering the floor and bumping into this or that pal from bookish activities past. I just wish I'd had more time to spend at BEA this year, but that's okay. I had a good reason to cut my time short- another week at the Bread Loaf Translator's Conference was approaching and I had to finish my packing. That was great! Maybe I'll tell you about that sometime soon.

My Favorite NYC Bookstores

This coming Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day, and I realized I've never talked to you about the bookstores I love here in NYC.

So my favorite bookstore café, and probably my favorite bookstore in NYC full stop, is HousingWorks. Located in an alleyway basically (126 Crosby Street, between East Houston and Prince Streets in Soho), they do good by doing well. Part of a larger organization serving and advocating for HIV+ and homeless New Yorkers, the store is about the best used bookstore I've ever been in. It's huge; it's beautiful; it's well-organized and well-stocked. It almost always has what I'm looking for, or what I didn't know I was looking for. And I can always find a seat in its large café that also serves yummy coffee and treats. It's the perfect destination for bookish me-time.

A few steps away is McNally Jackson Books (52 Prince Street), an independent bookstore whose distinguishing feature is that it organizes its fiction by geographic region. So when you want the latest from Italy, or Japan, or Nigeria, you know just where to head. It's a bookstore for the truly bookish.

Head north a few blocks and you hit the Strand Bookstore (828 Broadways & 12th St.) a legendary landmark featuring new and used books in a multi-floor, semi-labrythine setting. Go early in the day and have the place to yourself.

And hey, there are lots of little bookstores tucked into the village here and there- and to be honest I haven't visited them all. I haven't made it to the new location of Idlewild Books, though it was one of my favorites when it was in the Flatiron district. And I haven't gone to some of the really tiny ones. But I keep them on my agenda.

So we're going to continue to head north and visit Rizzoli Books at 1133 Broadway and 25th Street. Rizzoli used to be located on 57th Street across from Carnegie Hall, but that gorgeous mansion was torn down and the store moved downtown to its present location in a magnificent space not far from Eataly. I love coming here. It's such a pleasure to browse the beautiful coffee-table books and foreign specialties, many of which Rizzoli also publishes.  I don't get here often but I never leave empty-handed.

In midtown proper my favorite bookstore is Kinokuniya (1073 6th Avenue near W42nd St.), the American flagship of the Japanese chain. I buy translated books here as well as manga and anime-related movies and merchandise. They also have a yummy Japanese-food cafe I've been known to nosh at.

Keep heading up Fifth Avenue and eventually you will get to Albertine (972 Fifth Avenue near E.78th St.), a French bookstore housed in the French Cultural Center and child of the French Embassy. It's in another gorgeous 2-floor space and I always leave with something wonderful. Downstairs is mainly fiction but climb the stairs for graphic novels, cookbooks, art books and all kinds of delights.

Out in the boroughs I have to admit I'm not as fluent as I could be with the bookstores. I love WORD Brooklyn in Greenpoint (and their Jersey City branch too). I'm excited about the new Kew & Willow Books in Kew Gardens, Queens, and of course Astoria Books in Astoria, Queens is adorable. But the only one I really make the trip out to visit is Greenlight Bookstore in the Fort Greene and Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, at 686 Fulton Street. (They have opened a second branch, on Flatbush Ave., that I have not visited.) Greenlight is probably my favorite bookstore besides HousingWorks. It's beautiful, well-lit, and the selection feels like it was curated just for me. It's irresistible.

And I love Little City Books of Hoboken, of course. Who wouldn't? It's adorable, well-stocked and the perfect neighborhood bookstore.

But I'll browse in any bookstore that's open and on my path. And we do have so many to choose from in this great city!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I've been through a few things lately. I read The Devoted, by Blair Hurley, coming out in August I believe and one I really enjoyed. It's a kind of coming-of-age book about a woman who's already an adult, who gets pulled into a relationship with her Buddhist teacher that is unhealthy on many levels, and is trying to break free.

I also read Good Neighbors, by Joanne Serling, about a woman whose high-strung frenemy has adopted a little Russian girl with unhappy results. The book has a very distinctive writing style which may be accomplishing some literary end but did not work for me as a reader.

Finally I finished The Last Black Unicorn and The Shape of Bones. So that's all good.

What am I reading now?

The Balcony, by Jane Delury, is a novel about an estate in France and the people who lived there over the years. Every chapter is about a different person, a different voice. I'm intrigued so far. I've read books like this before (especially thinking of Jenny Erpenbeck's masterful The Visitation) so I'm not exactly coming to the concept fresh. We'll see.

On the bedside table I'm into volume 4 of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha series and working my way through Mirror City, by Chitrita Banerji, about an Indian woman living in Bangladesh dealing with culture clashes and her mixed marriage (her husband is Muslim and she's Hindu). I like it a lot.

I haven't picked a new audiobook yet. Just not in the right
mood I guess. At the gym I'm reading Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden, which is searing and difficult but important. This is about the only known escapee who was born inside one of North Korea's prison camps.

I still have Six Four floating around but some of the reading I'm doing is assignment stuff so I have to backburner it until I get some breathing room on the reading I have to do.

Blog-Appropriate Current Quilting Project

I may be in a reading slump, but I'm certainly not in a crafting one.

I finally found the book-quilt project I've been looking for. I've seen a lot- a lot- of book quilts where it's all spines, and those are fun to look at but from the perspective of doing it, piecing strips of fabric together in rows has always left me a little cold.

But I love foundation paper-piecing and the other day I found a pattern called Book Nerd that shows the covers with the pages open and decided to go for it.

I love the way it shows off fun fabric and gives me the opportunity to use up some "misfit" things that I haven't figured out how to use in blocks. And the pattern is simple enough that I can do it assembly-line style and knock out blocks relatively quickly.

It's also so versatile. You could use a variety of fabrics, like I'm doing, or do themes. There's a ton of comic book fabric out there; you could do a comic book quilt. Or you could pick fabrics that come from different places or show different locales and do a travel-book-quilt. Or a children's-book-quilt with some of the many many kids' prints like Eric Carle and Nancy Drew. The possibilities are endless!

What theme would you pick for your book quilt?

What's New on the Shelf?

Being in a bit of a reading slump hasn't stopped me from accumulating more books. No matter how slow my actual output my curiosity never rests.

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan. I think I read this in college but I'm not sure. Anyway I want to read it now because soon I'll be going on my fifth trip to San Francisco and I love reading about the city I love to visit.

The Brothers, by Masha Gessen. This is about the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. I have
my own experience of the bombing and I'm not sure what this book is going to tell me that I don't already know, but I respect Gessen's coverage of the Russian world and I'm interested to see what insights she can bring.

Anna, by Niccolo Ammaniti. I am not a big fan of post-apocalyptic dystopias but I can't resist Niccolo Ammaniti, so I had no choice but to pick up his latest to be translated into English.

The Break, by Katherena Vermette, is a melodrama set among a diverse community in Canada. It got my attention because I haven't seen many novels about indigenous Canadian people.

All of these are books I hope to get to sooner rather than later, but who knows, right? The only one I picked up intentionally was The Joy Luck Club; the rest were serendipitous finds on my many forays into the bookstores of NYC and northern New Jersey.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

So I basically cleared the decks last week- finally finished The Luminaries, gave up on my carry-around read and started a new one, and made it to book 3 of Buddha. I haven't started a new book at the gym because I was only able to make it to the gym once last week and forgot to take a new book. This week I have to travel for work and won't be at the gym at all (although I may be able to work out in my hotel room) so no new gym book this week either.

I did get to have some nice bookstore-cafe time last Monday and started Hideo Yokoyama's very compelling crime novel Six Four. It's about a police media-relations specialist and former detective dealing with three things at once. First, a controversy is brewing at his station because his department is refusing to release the name of a woman involved in a fatal car crash, so Yokoyama is dealing with police department politics and the issue of freedom of information. Secondly, Mikami, our main character, has a daughter who has disappeared. And finally an old case is coming back around, a case of a kidnapped and murdered child. Mikami has a lot on his plate and the book is long and detailed.

Bedside I'm reading Daniel Galera's latest in English, The Shape of Bones. This one is about a group of friends who are avid climbers. I like that his books seem to frequently feature athletes. It adds an interesting dimension to his characters and I learn a lot. I'm not far enough in to say more and it's a short book I hope to finish this week.

In audioland I have about an hour left of Tiffany Haddish's memoir The Last Black Unicorn. Since starting it I've become aware of the controversies around it and while I enjoy the book I'm not sure how those are going to shape my feelings about it in the end. I have a lot of audiobooks on deck and haven't decided what to start next. I'm leaning towards Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark but we'll see. And in the meantime maybe this is the book that will get me back to reviewing.

And like I said no new book at the gym, last week or this. I hope to be back in the swing soon.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I've been in a kind of miserable reading slump lately; I blogged about it then deleted the post, because I thought it sounded too whiny and bummed out. And that's not what I want to convey on my blog. But the fact remains. So here's what's been going on. I started and couldn't finish The Good Life Elsewhere, so I'm going to reshelve it for the future. I have a huge pile of books to sell, and I'm going to take some of them in today, then get a cup of coffee and have some "me time" at my favorite bookstore cafe, with a book of course. I don't know which one yet. Probably Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama but no promises.

Speaking of being bummed out, I lost my copy of Renoir: An Intimate Biography, with only about 60 pages to go, and I'm very bummed out about that. And I finished Jen Kirkman's I Know What I'm Doing and Other Lies I Tell Myself, which I found thoroughly delightful.

So here I am, it's Monday, and I'm still reading Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and I expect to finish it this week and have a new bedside read to tell you about next Monday. I'm also close to finishing volume 2 of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha series of graphic novels/manga.

On the audio front, I am really enjoying Tiffany Haddish's The Last Black Unicorn. You should all go read that right away.

And I don't have any new gym reads right now and may just stick to magazines for a while. I feel like reading about San Francisco since I'm going there soon, so maybe I'll start that book I got there last year about the earthquake. Or something else. Who knows?