Hi Readers,
Reality check, right now have come to a time that is just shy of the geographic center of summer break based on the fact that the last day of school was June 6 and the first day of school for next year is August 25. Well, at least in my area this is true.
Lately, my brain just wants comfort. I like summer but I haven’t really fallen into the groove yet of an easy, breezy, lazy summer days. Maybe the next part of summer will be more relaxed.
I have been doing some reading, but not all the reading.
I opted not to read my book club’s June book because I had trouble getting into it. It was called Go As a River by Shelly Read.
I like the way belonging to a book club gets me to read outside of my comfort zone. However it feels challenging for me when my brain is not necessarily up for going outside of my comfort zone.
I am currently working on The Vegetarian by Han Kang because it is our July selection for the book club. In August, I am leading our book discussion for the book club and the book we will be discussing is White Noise by Don DeLillo. Honestly, neither of these books for the book club have been easy reads for me.
The Vegetarian has only around 200 pages but some disturbing things have happened in the book thus far. I hated it on the first two days that I was reading it. Then I got into it a little more and now I like it better. It was originally written in Korean in 2007 and published in the United States in 2016. It won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and Nobel Prize in 2024.
White Noise is a dense fiction book, written back in 1985. I feel like I have to think about every sentence, like there is some important meaning in every sentence. It doesn’t come easily.
I have also been reading books that fall into my usual tastes. I do love a memoir. Last month, I read I finished the book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Lori Gottlieb. I got this book out of a little free library in my town. I found it to be an engaging read about a therapist who lives in Los Angeles and her patients and her own therapist and therapy experience.
While my sister Liz was visiting, I recalled a piece of advice from a book called Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps by Kelly Williams Brown. When this book came out in 2013, while I was already real adult in my 30’s, but I remember finding her advice to be useful.
I decided to look the author up and see what she was doing now because she wrote that book in her 20’s and more than ten years had passed. I wanted to know what she had been up to. When I looked her up, I learned that in her 30’s she got divorced, broke 3 bones in a short amount of time, made some crafts, and had a stint at a psychiatric hospital then wrote a book about it. That book is called Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things.
Surprise, surprise, this book is also a memoir! I was glad that I went down the rabbit hole of looking her up when I remembered her book. I do have a type!
So that’s what I have been reading.
Also I am reading the Harry Potter Series aloud to Mr. Man and working on reading aloud with H. Nugget.
What are you reading this summer?
I looked up Kelly Williams Brown books, and she has wrote one about charm that sounds interesting. I might go down a rabbit hole of reading her books.
Apparently, the hostess book is inspired by her ex-mother-in-law and she tried to cancel it’s publication but her publisher wouldn’t let her.