Whew! Slightly delayed, due to Labor Day, but what a week-ish in books. Five finished and one started in the last week and change – definitely got my reading mojo back from the summer. There are so many that it’s a bit difficult to remember the order and cadence and all that. I blazed through Five Little Pigs early in the week last week, looking for something orderly after a few stressful days at the office. Agatha Christie was just what the doctor ordered – always is.

Then, staring down the barrel of the start of a new month, and a new season – although it will be hot here for several more weeks, and I’m just fine with that – I grabbed a couple more off my summer reading stack. I was literally months behind on A Poem for Every Summer Day, so the first order of business was catching up, and I finished on time on August 31. (I’ve switched to A Poem for Every Autumn Day now, which feels funny as the weather here in Virginia is still plenty hot and sticky.) Then I squeezed in a recent acquisition – Summer Pudding, by Susan Scarlett (Noel Streatfeild’s nom de plume for her novels for adults) – which came highly recommended. I blazed through and loved it, and turned to another new acquisition: Nella Last’s War. This was the fall publication from Slightly Foxed and just arrived in my mailbox last week. And now I’m already done with it. Almost felt like being a kid again, getting a new book and inhaling it immediately. Oh, and over the same stretch of days I finished listening to Going Solo, read by the wonderful Dan Stevens. (I’ve been resisting reading Boy, the first volume of Roald Dahl’s autobiographies, because I didn’t feel any need to read about the real-life horrors who inspired characters like Miss Trunchbull and the Grand High Witch… but now that I know Dan Stevens reads that one too, I might actually download it. We’ll see.)

Finally wrapped up the weekend reading by starting Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The action begins on a cold January day, so perhaps I should have saved it for winter reading. But I’ve realized that the clock is ticking loudly on finishing my Classics Club Challenge, and I need to recommit to sprinkling those books in. (I read classics almost exclusively, but apparently not the ones I put on my challenge list – figures.) I’m only about fifty pages in, so I have a ways to go. Stay tuned for a full review once I’ve finished.

When not reading over the weekend, I was on the water with these three chuckleheads. Look at this: two kids in their own kayaks! It’s a Labor Day miracle! Also, get a load of the hand-holding. Eeeeeeeeeee.

What did you read over the long weekend?