Happy Monday, happy Leap Day, happy new week.  Last week was terrible.  I mean, it was one of those weeks where if something could go wrong, it did go wrong – it felt like one disaster after another.  Monday was the worst of it, but the rest of the week didn’t get much better from there.  It was almost comically awful, and I found myself repeating that old motivational saying “If Britney could get through 2007, I can get through today” more times than I can count.  So I don’t really want to talk about what we were up to.  Just look at the cute picture of babies in a race car shopping cart (pretty much the highlight of the week) and let’s just talk about books.

It might have been a bad week in life, but it was a good week in books, so at least there’s that.  I started the week off by finishing up the second volume of March, Congressman John Lewis’ graphic memoir.  This volume was all about Lewis’ experiences as a Freedom Rider and leading SNCC, and culminated in the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech – so powerful.  There’s going to be a third volume at some point, so I’ll be keeping my eyes open for that.  Then I opened Jam on the Vine, about which I’d heard great things on the All the Books! podcast.  I only got about a chapter in before I had to pick up my library holds, though, and as I predicted, one of them was a seven-day book: Angela Flournoy’s acclaimed debut, The Turner House.  So I tabled Jam on the Vine and switched to the Turner family saga, and I’m about twenty pages away from finishing it as of this Monday morning.  I’d have finished it over the weekend, but bedtime shenanigans saw me spending most of both Saturday and Sunday nights rocking Nugget to sleep for hours, and not reading my library book.

Plans for the week in books including finishing The Turner House today, and then turning my attention back to Jam on the Vine.  And then I don’t know what – maybe back to We that are Left, which is due back to the library on March 8th (and I think I’m out of renewals).

On the blog front, my Black History Month reading round-up on Wednesday, and the next Colorado recap on Friday.  Check back!

What are you reading this week?

Here we go – the very last bookish 2015 post before we turn our attention completely to 2016 reading!  In looking back over book superlative posts from years past, I realized that this is the fifth year I’ve been giving high school yearbook awards to the books I read over the past year!  That seems totally crazy, but I assure you, it’s true.  (See past book superlative posts here: 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.)  These are always some of my favorite posts to write each year.  So with that, let’s get to it!

Brainiest – The 2015 valedictorian has to be Marilynne Robinson’s The Givenness of Things.  A collection of essays on theology, philosophy, Shakespeare, culture, and American political economy,  Robinson’s latest work was challenging in all the best ways.  Definitely the smartest thing I read all year (it was also the last!).

Best Looking – While sometimes I go for a book with lovely illustrations in this category, this year it’s a cover that takes home the title.  Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See is gorgeous.  It helps that the story in between the absolutely stunning covers is beautiful, too.

Best Friends – It’s friendship TO THE MAX for Jo, April, Mal, Molly and Ripley as they attend Miss Qiunzilla Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s camp for hard-core lady-types, where all is most definitely not as it seems.  Monsters!  Greek gods!  Dinosaurs!  Anagrams!  When you have friends like this crew, nothing can stop you.

Class Clown – The funniest in the bunch has got to be Yes Please, by my girl Amy Poehler!  I am a huge fan of Amy’s work on SNL and especially on Parks and Recreation, which is one of my all-time favorite shows.  Her book was just as funny as you’d expect.  KNOPE WE CAN!

Biggest Jock – The Class of 2015 was more nerdy than sporty, but we do have one jock in the bunch – Maggie Thrash, who describes in Honor Girl how rifle practice helped her work through her feelings for a female camp counselor.

Teacher’s Pet – How can you overlook Crossing to Safety, a novel about the friendship between two English professors and their wives, for this category?  It was one of my favorite books of the year, and the academia setting was dreamy.

Biggest Nerd – It’s not such a bad thing to be a geek when it saves your life, like it does for Mark Watney in The Martian, by Andy Weir.  Steve and I both read and loved The Martian, and we saw the movie on opening night – it was so awesome!

Most Creative – Elizabeth Gilbert takes this one for Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, her manifesto on the artistic life.  She’s definitely the one pressing copies of the literary magazine into every unwilling hand this year.

Most Opinionated – We have a tie!  I have to give the “most opinionated” title to Ta-Nehisi Coates for his spectacular memoir/history/manifesto, Between the World and Me, which took the bookish world by storm this year.  In any other year he’d hold the title on his own, but Margo Jefferson had a lot to say in 2015 as well.  Negroland, her memoir of growing up in a privileged African-American enclave, was breathtaking – especially her perfectly explained, brilliantly reasoned discussion of intersectional feminism.  How lucky am I to have read two such wonderful, eye-opening book this year?

Most Likely to End Up in Hollywood – I could cheat and say The Martian, since it already is a movie, or Captain Marvel or Black Widow, which I believe are both planned, but I’m going to stay true to the spirit of this award and instead give the title to a book I think would make an excellent (albeit distressing) movie: Judy Blume’s newest, In the Unlikely Event.  Based on true events that took place when Blume was a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, this is an edge-of-your-seat page-turner that seems tailor made for the big screen.

Biggest Rebel – He’s constantly confusing, confounding the British henchmen – everyone give it up for America’s favorite fightin’ Frenchman!  Biggest Rebel goes to the teenaged French aristocrat who turned up at George Washington’s side and made himself the most popular immigrant in American history – Lafayette in the Somewhat United States.  Vowell brings her trademark humor to history with her newest book, which I just loved.  Between Lafayette and the Hamilton soundtrack, which I cannot stop listening to, I’m itching to get back to Mount Vernon for a visit.  (I can’t promise that I won’t break out in song… errrr, rap… if I do.)

Biggest Loner – This year’s weirdo is actually not a loner, but I promise you, these two are creepy.  You do not want to run into Norah and Jonah Grayer in David Mitchell’s Slade House.  Trust me on that one.  (This terrifying book is going to become a Halloween tradition for me.  Sleep is overrated.)

Cutest Couple – They don’t make ’em any cuter than Nick and Bex in The Royal We.  One of my favorite books of the year, We was Will and Kate fan-fic at its finest.  Officially adding my voice to the chorus that is begging for a sequel.  With babies!

Most Likely to Succeed – This one has to go to Eva Thorvald, the reclusive celebrity chef at the center of J. Ryan Stradal’s fun novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest.  Eva is mysterious, but with the help of her perfect palate, she is the ultimate foodie success story.

As always, book superlatives are a blast!  What high school yearbook awards would you give your 2015 books?

2015 was quite a year in reading!  I started the year off in a reading slump, which I was starting to think might just be my new normal.  After slow months in January and February (four books each month) things picked up and I got my mojo back, oddly enough, once Nugget arrived in March.  As I type this post up on December 31st, my calculations show that I read 94 books this year, or 28,203 pages, which I think is pretty darn great for a year in which I had a newborn and a toddler, a job, and a house on the market.  Reading has always been a source of comfort and contentment for me, and I think that really shows when you consider that with everything I had going on, in my sparse free time, I chose to turn pages.  And, for the most part, I enjoyed myself – according to Goodreads, I only rated one book one-star (“didn’t like it”) this year: Go Set a Watchman.  By contrast, I gave five stars (“it was amazing”) to fifteen books – so either I’m an easy grader, or I read some great stuff this year.  My longest book, at 656 pages, was The Fellowship, and my shortest, at 112 pages, was Best Easy Day Hikes: Buffalo.

Enough chatter!  Let’s make charts!

Fiction/Non-Fiction

I’m not at all surprised to see that I favored fiction in 2015.  I am a little bit surprised to see that the scales weren’t tipped quite as far in the fictional direction as they usually are.  55 fiction, and 39 non-fiction, is probably as close to evenly split as I’m ever going to get.  And as I’ll get into in more detail next week, when I share my top ten reads of the year, some of my favorite books this past year were non-fiction.  Either I’m growing as a reader, or there has been a lot of good non-fiction out there recently, or both.  I’ll take it.

Source of Book

Is anyone surprised that out of 94 books read this year, 74 of them came from the library?  No?  Me, neither.  Let’s move on.

(Next year I swear I’m going to #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks.)

Fiction Genres

A couple of noteworthy things about my fiction reading this year: for one, I think it’s pretty well spread out over genres.  (You’ll notice that sci-fi and fantasy are missing; that was an oversight when I was mining the data, and by the time I caught it, it was too late to go back and re-count everything.  So the sci-fi and fantasy novels I read this year – and there were a few – got lumped into other genres, namely literary fiction, general fiction, and YA, depending on where I thought they fit best.  Sorry about that!)  Next, I need to read more classics if I’m going to make it through the Classics Club challenge.  But while I was disappointed in only six classics, I was pleased to see 16 literary fiction titles.  The other noteworthy thing?  Fourteen comics!  (I know, as Kim pointed out in her 2015 wrap-up, comic is really a format, not a genre, but this is how it makes sense in my head so I’m counting it this way.  The two non-fiction comics I read, which were both graphic memoirs, were assigned to the memoir genre below, so they’re not counted as “comics” here.)

Non-Fiction Genres

The one thing I have to point out here is that my “other” category really got out of control.  Books I shelved as “other” mostly belonged to one of two genres: time management, or social science (or, in the case of Overwhelmed, which was one of my favorite reads of the year, both) and I really should have broken it out further.  But, as with sci-fi/fantasy in the fiction chart, by the time I realized that there was a better way to mine the data, I was too far into it to want to go back and start over.  Anyway, I read some great non-fiction this year.  I really enjoyed the history and memoir books I read, as I usually do, and probably at least a couple will find their way onto my top ten list for the year.  Less enjoyable was the parenting book bender I went on for awhile last spring before I cut myself off (I was starting to feel like the world’s worst mother, which I know is not remotely the case, and I decided I’d stay saner if I took a break).  But 2015 really was a great year in non-fiction – with new Erik Larson and new Sarah Vowell, what more can you ask for?

That’s all the data I collected this year, unfortunately.  I’m not great about tracking my books through the year, so while I’d love to see more information about my reading trends (for example, male/female breakdowns, author race, setting of books, etc.) I don’t have the time or inclination, this year, to wade through all of my old book review posts and try to figure that out.  In 2016 I’m planning to track my books on a spreadsheet and I’m hoping that, if I keep up with that, I’ll have more information at my fingertips next December.  I’m also hoping for more representation by authors of color, more classic literature, and more settings outside the United States and England – so we’ll see how I do with those goals!

Ugh.  I don’t know why, but I’m starting this week out extra grumpy, which is not the best way to begin a new week, but whatever.  This weekend sort of flew by, and I don’t know where it went.  It doesn’t feel like we got much done, either.  On Saturday we made it to Letchworth State Park for our October hike (recap coming soon, after I recap our September hike!) and to check out the turning leaves.  We missed peak by a week or two (don’t get me started) but it was still pretty.  On Sunday I’d hoped to get more work done around the house, but I didn’t really accomplish very much.  Nugget and I ran some errands, and I made lentil soup for the week’s lunches (I’m not a sandwich person, but still try to pack lunch to save money), but that’s it.  The house is trashed and our home improvement projects are still in rough shape.  Well, you can’t win them all, I guess.

As far as reading is concerned, I do have a personal victory to report: I finally finished Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, the new Salman Rushdie novel.  I liked it, but not as much as I have liked the other Rushdie novels I’ve read.  Still, I’m glad I made the time to read it.  Other reading last week: I finished Between the World and Me, which was every bit as stunning as the internet said it would be, and also the first volume of the 2012 Captain Marvel.  So a bit of a light week of reading, but that Rushdie was kind of slow going for a short-ish book.  Now I’m midway through Sorcerer to the Crown, another one that came highly recommended, and I’m loving it so far.  (It’s been billed as a diverse, feminist Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and that seems to be right on the money.  I loved Jonathan Strange, and I love diversity, and I AM a feminist, so I’m digging Sorcerer to the Crown.)  In addition to Sorcerer, I have two more books due back to the library on Wednesday: My Brilliant Friend and Honor Girl.  So it’s looking like a busy week ahead in reading.

Coming up this week on the blog: my fall list (yes, really) on Wednesday, and the penultimate vacation recap post on Friday.  Check back!

What are you reading this week?

Happy Columbus Day to my American friends, and Happy Thanksgiving to our neighbors to the north!  I hope you’re all having a lovely holiday weekend.  I have always loved Columbus Day because it falls right around my birthday – some years I get a three-day weekend for my big day, which is always extra fun.  (Not this year, but I’m still enjoying the holiday weekend birthday proximity, so.)  The kids and I celebrated with a trip to our local bookstore this morning (Peanut got A Pocket for Corduroy, and I grabbed 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, which I’ve been eyeing – happy early birthday to me!).  We had sort of a roller-coaster weekend.  Saturday started off annoying – it’s a long story, but we drove to Letchworth for a family hike (my birthday wish) and ended up getting turned around and having to go home without even getting into the park.  Really annoying, and I was bumming hard.  We salvaged the day with a trip to the pumpkin patch after nap, but everyone was a bit out of sorts.  Yesterday we went for a stroll through Tifft Nature Preserve, to make up for the missed hike of the day before – but it wasn’t the same.  I’m really hoping to get to Letchworth before the leaves are all gone, but I’m not sure if it will happen – insert sad face here.

Last week was a productive one in the reading life!  I didn’t even realize how productive until I looked back at my Goodreads activity and I finished four books!  The highlight was Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi – a graphic memoir of growing up in revolutionary Iran.  It was shocking and powerful and I don’t know how I missed it when it came out a few years ago.  I read it in honor of Banned Books Week – it’s one of the most frequently challenged recent graphic novels.  (Although it’s a memoir, not a novel.)  It was hard to read in parts, but really, really wonderful.  Then I finally read Go Set a Watchman, the “new” Harper Lee novel – and as I expected, I didn’t like it.  I’ll have a whole post coming soon on why I decided to read it, and more detail about what I thought.  After that I read the new Patrick DeWitt novel, Undermajordomo Minor, which I really enjoyed, but which lost a “star” (went from four to three) because of a bizarre scene involving baked goods that made me want to gouge my eyes out.  If you’ve read it, you know what I’m talking about, and let’s agree to never speak of this again, mmmmkay?  Then, because I really needed a palate cleanser, I finished re-reading Where’d You Go, Bernadette? – one of my favorite books of recent years.  It was just as funny and charming as I remembered, and exactly what I wanted to read after a week of violent revolution, hero-besmirching and weird food… oh, right, I said I wasn’t going to talk about the Undermajordomo Minor food scene again.  Sorry.

For this week: I’m currently reading the new Margaret Atwood novel, The Heart Goes Last.  In vintage Atwood style, it started off moderately unsettling and has escalated.  I’m on about page 120 and it’s thoroughly weirding me out – but it’s well-written and engaging and so, so good.  I also have the new Salman Rushdie checked out from the library, but it’s non-renewable and due back on Wednesday and, once again, I think it will be heading back unread because I just won’t have the time to finish it.  So back on the wait list I’ll go.  And instead, while I’m waiting, I will fiiiiiiiiiiiiiinally pick up Between the World and Me, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am to read it.  I’ve read a few excerpts and they’re just beautiful and heart-rending and I can’t wait.  I can’t wait.  Oh, and speaking of buzz – I’m also in the middle of Big Magic, the new Elizabeth Gilbert book, and hopefully I’ll be able to finish that this week, too.  Oh, and Tuesday is LUMBERJANES DAY!  Which means that all this other reading is going to get tossed aside as soon as I have the new trade paperback in my hands, because FRIENDSHIP TO THE MAX!

Okay, enough babbling.  This was supposed to be a short check-in and here I’ve been rambling for three paragraphs.  What are you reading?

It’s Labor Day!  Happy holiday weekend to my friends in the U.S., and happy new week to the rest of the world!  Here in Buffalo we are busy giving summer a good send-off.  Saturday was a bit blah (not weather-wise, but just doings-wise; we are potty training so we haven’t been going too far from home recently) but yesterday we did get out to the Food Trucks and Fire Trucks festival in East Aurora.  We had a yummy dinner from food trucks (including Lloyd’s Taco Truck, my favorite!) and then Peanut got the chance to climb around some of the East Aurora fire department vehicles.  Today we’re headed out for a last summer hike before we turn our attention to fall and fall things.

As far as reading goes, I had a bit of a brain freeze on Friday.  All week I’d been plugging away at The Fellowship, and I figured that a three day weekend was just the ticket to finishing it.  I’m sure I would have too, except for reasons best known to, well, nobody, I took the book out of my work tote and put it on the bookshelf in my office on Friday… and left it there.  And since I wasn’t about to make a trip into the office just to get a book – on a long weekend, no less! – The Fellowship is still lingering on my “currently reading” list.  But it wasn’t a total loss as far as reading weekends go – far from it.  Even without The Fellowship I made good progress on my library books.  I had two seven day books out – Malice at the Palace (the new Her Royal Spyness mystery) and Kitchens of the Great Midwest – and I blew through them both.  Both were great, but I especially loved Malice at the Palace.  A visit with Georgie is always a joy.  Now that I’ve checked off my two waiting pool books, I’ve started The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and it’s fantastic.  I can already tell that I’ll be buying a copy.

Reading goals for this week: finish The Fellowship, FINALLY – it’s due back to the library on Friday – as well as Lovelace and Babbage.  And then I’m not sure what I’m going to read next.  I have a couple of parenting books checked out from the library that I really need to get to sooner than later, so I may tackle one of those.  Or a new comic?  And I’m sure I will also be starting The Custom of the Country for our Edith Wharton readalong (sign up by dropping a comment on this post if you haven’t yet!)… so many good books to read, so little time!

I have a fun week coming up here, too.  On Wednesday I’ll show you a super cool hike that we did with our friends Zan and Paul back in August, and on Friday the second day of our all-too-brief visit to D.C. on our way to the Outer Banks in July!  Slowly but surely, we’re catching up here.

Hope you have a great week, my friends!  What are you reading?

I’m a voracious reader – always have been – and I’ve been reading classics since a very young age.  Still, I often feel like – even with decades of reading behind me already – I have so much more to read.  And with authors publishing amazing new books on a weekly basis, it can be hard to get to those backlisted titles – you know, the ones you’ve been meaning to read forever and a day.  We all have those authors on our list: the ones that we’d love to read their entire bibliography if only we had time.  For me, topping my list of “someday I’ll get to her” is Edith Wharton.

I read Ethan Frome in high school and detested it.  (Why is Ethan Frome assigned?  It’s not Wharton’s best work, nor is it particularly representative of her style or usual subject matter.)  Then many years later, I read The Age of Innocence for the first time, and absolutely loved it.  I mean, yes, Newland Archer is a spineless blog of rich jelly, but that May Welland!  Talk about unsung, underappreciated ATTITUDE.  Quiet, shy, unassuming May turns out to be made of absolute steel.  She’s my hero.  Anyway, The Age of Innocence became one of my favorite books, because May.  May!  But despite my love for Innocence, I haven’t branched out to Wharton’s other novels – not out of disinclination, but out of pure lack of time coupled with a teetering TBR pile.  It always bothered me that I hadn’t read more Wharton.

So much that the other night, up late feeding the baby, I mused on Twitter that I really needed to read more Edith Wharton.  My friend Jen immediately replied, urging me to pick a Wharton book and promising to read whatever I chose.  A reading buddy!  Yeah!  I made a quick decision and Jen was in – and she extended an invitation to our friend Zan to join us.  The next thing I knew, we were a group of three – the makings of a respectable readalong group.  Jen and I tweeted our other friends and it looks like we might have a decent showing for this little endeavor – prompting me to formalize it in this post.

So, the details: We’re going to read The Custom of the Country over the course of September.  As it’s not a particularly gigantic tome, I don’t see a need for regular check-ins – anytime you get around to reading and posting about the book over the month is great.  To join in, leave a comment here telling me if you’ve read any Wharton before, and if you have, which Wharton is your favorite.  When you’ve finished the book, leave another comment linking me to your review; I’ll collect the reviews and publish links in a big post at the beginning of October.  (To be included, just get me the link via the comments section by the end of the day on September 30.)

We’ll also be discussing the book on social media, using the hashtag #FallingForEdith – so feel free to join in the conversation wherever you find it!  I personally will be on Twitter and Instagram talking Wharton all month.  Hope to see you there!

Now, who’s with me?  Leave a comment below if you’re in for The Custom of the Country!

Monday… here you are again.  They just keep coming around.  This one is kind of bittersweet – it’s my last Monday of maternity leave.  I’m back to work, full-time, on Wednesday.  It’s going to be good to get back to a routine, and to contribute to the family income again, but I’m definitely sad about it ending – and I’m really going to miss little Nugget during the days.  I’ve gotten so used to his little presence in my arms (sometimes, it seems, 24 hours a day) and I remember how hard it was for me to go back to work after having Peanut.  Well, I got through it once (twice, if you count the time I took off after moving up here) and I’ll do it again.

Anyway, since my reading speed is likely to slow down considerably starting this week (Peanut’s school is closed, so I’m on full-time mom-of-two duty today and tomorrow, then reality hits on Wednesday) I’m glad to report that I got some good reading done last week.  I finished Jane Austen’s England, the Marvel Illustrated version of Pride and Prejudice, and – just yesterday – The Martian.  I loved The Martian!  Now I can’t wait for the movie – just about a month.  Matt Damon is absolutely perfect for the role of Mark Watney.  And – bonus! – since Steve read and loved the book, too, we’re both equally geeked out about a movie for once.  (Usually one of us is really excited and the other is kind of going along with it, you know, out of love.)  Anyway, I’m already assembling a list of possible babysitters to call, because we have GOT to make this movie thing happen.  No way I can wait for Netflix on this one.

My main goal for this week is to finish The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings.  It’s taking way too long.  It’s a really interesting book, and I think I’d enjoy it much more if I had more brain power to devote to it.  But unfortunately it’s quite dense, and I’m quite tired (as you all know).  I’m about halfway through and just got the book back from the library after previously being compelled to return it (there was a queue).  It’ll probably take me all week, but I really do want to get through it.  I’m just too far into it now to abandon it – I’d hate myself.  Anyway, if I actually manage to finish The Fellowship this week, I plan to reward myself with another library book: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, which I checked out of the library after hearing Liberty Hardy rave about it on the All the Books! podcast.  It looks AWESOME, and I can’t wait to pick it up.  So that’s my motivation for finishing The Fellowship.  That and the pride of a job well done.

Coming up on the blog this week – a special announcement on Wednesday!  My friend Jen and I will be hosting our first readalong.  More details to come, but we’re going to be reading Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country in September.  I can’t wait to dig in!  Now I just have to figure out how to work the Mr. Linky – blogging geniuses, any tips or tricks you have to share would be more than welcome.  And then on Friday, I’ll share my list of reads from August; it’s a good one.  Lots of fun bookishness this week – feels great!

How about you – what are you reading this week?