What I’m reading….

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of all over the place with my posts recently. There was the retro rant about days gone by and a book slamming review. I’ve also been revisiting old drafts and trying to rework them to see the light of day.

I’m reading more and more in the evenings now. We’ve binged watched everything that was worthy (and some that weren’t) and I would rather just curl up with a book or my Kindle. I usually have a couple of books started at one time and sometimes three.

Here’s what I’ve got going this month:

Kristen Hannah’s Between Sisters: When I see a Kristen Hannah $2.99 or less Kindle deal, I buy it. I enjoy her style of writing even though it could be said that almost all of her early stuff has the same female lead, someone who is successful and single and usually broken. Same here but I like an easy-to-read diversion from time-to-time. Her early stuff does not hold a candle to her historical fiction and what she’s turning out now!

We Might Just Make It After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade by Elyce Arons. I won an ARC from GoodReads. I am enjoying it and maybe about a quarter way through. I am mostly enjoying reading about Arons’ youth on a farm in Kansas and her growing up in 80s.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece: A novel by Tom Hanks. I bought this book this summer when I was visiting mom. I can’t pass up a good BOGO offer at B&N. I am about halfway through it and I might call it a challenging read. There’s a lot of pre-story and back-story and not sure where it all fits in yet. It does remind me a little of The Offer, the series about making The Godfather.

My Christmas present from mom. I’ve read one and just opened February’s.

Mom gave me the coolest (and heaviest) gift for Christmas. She made up her own book-of-the-month club. The first one I opened (for January) was The Choice by Nicholas Sparks.

It was a quick read. I literally read it in a day but know that I was doing a lot of skimming. There was too much pre-relationship action. Did I really need to know all the ends and outs of his friends’ relationships with their wives and what children belonged to whom and who was a bit overweight and who still surfed a bit? Not really. I did need to meet Stephanie, his strong and opinionated sister. Other than that, I totally scanned these chapters. I was just trying to get through the book.

Part II had me. I flipped and read most every word. I thought I saw the ending coming and was expecting it because of Sparks. I will just leave it there. I rated it a 3.5. I’m rating mom’s present(s) a 5+++++.

On February 1, I unwrapped the second one: Still Life by Louise Penny. Mom is checking on me to see what I’ve unwrapped, if I cheated and what I thought. I feel like I need to provide her with book reports.

I’m also doing some listening on top of my reading. On the audio book front, there is this one:

The audio book, The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post by Allison Pataki as read by Barrie Kreinik, has been a diversion while I’m driving back and forth to work. I swear I have read some of Pataki’s works before but if I did, I didn’t put them in GoodReads. The narrator is driving me crazy. I can’t decided if it’s her inflections that make the main character sound alternatively like a snob and an idiot or if it’s the writing.

I am now off to the library to pick up whatever Ina Garten cookbooks are available. The next Cook the Books selection (which I am hosting) is Be Ready When the Luck Happens, her latest book and memoir.

Can I get these all read? Probably. And I actually have two months to get Ina read!

Consider joining us for the February/March round at Cook the Books. You can read the announcement post here.

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