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?

On Saturday evening, we went for a family walk after dinner, just around the neighborhood. I commented that while it had been fun being on vacation, I was happy to be home for awhile now. Nugget replied, “Not me. I would like to spend at least three more weeks in South Dakota.” Sorry, buddy, all good things – even vacation – must come to an end! And actually, we were on the go so much over the last few months that I really do feel a little relieved to be home and back in a routine, even if I do hate back-to-school (and oh, I do, I hate it so much). I have one more trip in September – a business trip to Nashville for a team retreat. And then really home until at least the holidays, and possibly even longer, since we haven’t decided if we will make any Thanksgiving or Christmas visits this year. With the return to routine should come more reading, too, and I’m also glad about that.

Notwithstanding the routine, last week was a slow week on the reading front. There were a few reasons for this: one, I went to the office four days last week. I usually aim for working in the office two days per week, and from home the rest of the time, but we had visitors from other offices and I went in to see them. And even more outside the usual course, last Monday and Tuesday I drove into D.C. to work from our office there (my normal office is in Arlington), so the commute was longer, the parking was different – everything was a little off. I did Wednesday and Thursday in Arlington and that was better, but still a lot. How did I commute into the city five days per week before the pandemic? Anyway, it didn’t impact my reading time so much – that’s confined to evenings no matter where I work – but it definitely drained my energy levels, especially when you consider that last week was also the first week of school. I’m tired just typing all of this out. And then on Thursday I had an unusually stressful day, which spilled over into Friday, and that drained my energy levels even more. All of that does impact reading.

All this to say, I spent the entire week over Father, which normally would take just a couple of evenings of reading, and didn’t finish it until Saturday afternoon. I really enjoyed it, though – it was such a delightful read. Possibly a 2022 highlight? We’ll see. I devoted Saturday afternoon’s reading to the summer issue of Slightly Foxed, since I’m expecting the fall issue in my mailbox soonish. And then after the multiple work stresses of Thursday and Friday I was looking for some soothing “convalescent literature” to pick me up, and there’s nothing for that like Agatha Christie. Five Little Pigs it was. I flew through it, didn’t guess the solution – well, I guessed partially, but fell far short of figuring out the whole puzzle – and enjoyed myself thoroughly. Finished it this morning over my coffee, and haven’t decided yet what’s next.

It’s nice to be home and stomping our old familiar hiking trails again, even if some people would prefer to still be in South Dakota…

What are you reading this week?

Another missed post last week (sorry! blame late summer) and another slow couple of weeks on the book front. (I expect the pace to pick up considerably come September, so thank you for hanging in there with me.) Last week started on an especially hectic note – we returned home from our summer road trip through the Dakotas (with Wyoming interlude) at 8:30pm, and I left the house for a business trip to Connecticut at 4:30am the very next day. Oof. It was a whirlwind couple of days and I didn’t get home until after midnight on Tuesday night – or technically, Wednesday morning – and I didn’t read at all. When I wasn’t in meetings or driving between sites, I was trying to catch up on a mountain of work that piled up during my vacation, and I spent my almost non-existent free time on Monday night chatting with my favorite aunt over the phone, not reading. No regrets!

Anyway, bookish focus came back in direct proportion to the amount of work that I whittled away, and by the weekend I was back deep in pages, which is how I like to be. By midweek I finished up Midsummer Mysteries and mostly enjoyed it – although as with every short story collection, some of the offerings were better than others. (The Marple and Poirot stories in the collection were, of course, the highlights!) There’s a sort of matching edition for winter and the holidays, so I’ve got that on my to-purchase list for this fall.

Then I stayed in the general mystery/golden age crime category and returned to my kindle book – Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. I usually only read on my kindle when I’m traveling or reading something so large and unwieldy that I don’t want a physical book, but I also don’t like leaving a book partially read. I enjoyed this doorstopper of a literary biography, but was pretty much over it by the weekend, with hours of reading still ahead of me; I finally got through on Sunday night. I’m still rather in the mood for golden age detective fiction (and ancillary nonfiction) and have a few titles on my to-read-soon pile, but in the meantime I decided to take a break from murder and mayhem and read something different. Father, by Elizabeth von Arnim, is Miranda Mills‘ choice for the Comfort Book Club this month, and I happened to have a copy – so decision made, and that was an easy one! I started it so late on Friday that I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but I’m already enjoying it – Father’s determination that there should be “no fuss” about his surprise marriage, and adult daughter Jennifer’s determination to move out as a result, had me chuckling out loud within the first couple of pages. Can’t wait to see where the story goes from that strong beginning.

No instagram picture to share this week! We did literally nothing over the weekend, which felt AMAZING. Back to busy life, and posting regularly, this week – I PROMISE.

Oof. I flaked on you again, friends! I’m so sorry. In my defense, I tried to write and schedule posts for last week, but I was out of town on vacation and WiFi was spottier than expected – chalk it up to technical difficulties. I’m back now (sort of – vacation is sadly over, but I’m already back on the road, this time for work for two days and then really back from this intense summer of travel… until September, anyway).

Anyway, once again, because it was a heavy travel week, I didn’t do that much reading. I read more than I usually do on vacation, because we were camping in South Dakota and there was a fair amount of downtime while the kids played around the tent. So I got in a few pages with one eye on my kindle and the other on the anklebiters, alternating between enjoying book time and shouting things like “Don’t hit your brother/sister!” or “Hey, that tree is alive!”

So most pages this week were electronic: I finished Someday, Someday, Maybe, by Lauren Graham – and as already reported, enjoyed it. But would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t mistakenly think it was her memoir (it’s actually a light and funny novel about an aspiring actress in New York City). That one’s on me. Then I picked up Elizabeth von Arnim’s In the Mountains, which felt like an appropriate choice for camping (although the Swiss Alps are not quite the same as the Black Hills of South Dakota). It was a quick read, lovely and poignant as all von Arnims are. Finally, on the last day of the trip, I started Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life – satisfying a recent craving for a big literary biography. I’m not quite a quarter of the way through, but really enjoying it so far. It may have been a mistake to start a chunkster right before ending the trip, because I usually try to time my reading so that I finish a kindle book right as I am wrapping up travel. But I’ll be in a hotel tonight and on a long train ride tomorrow evening, so I expect progress. I will report back.

Last book to mention – Midsummer Mysteries (a collection of mostly forgettable short stories from Christie, which I will freely admit I bought because of the beautiful cover). It’s been mostly on hold the last week or so, as it’s a hardcover and I no longer travel with physical books. But I did put myself to sleep last night with one story, so it counts. I’ll finish it when I get home from my business trip on Wednesday.

Hiking Devils Tower in Wyoming! Really, really epic.

Last week was a week of reading in short little bursts, between long stretches of doing other things. Steve and I were living the digital nomad life in Roatan, Honduras – scuba diving in the morning and working in the afternoon. That whirlwind didn’t leave much time for leisure reading, and I never read much on vacation anyway – I’d rather be staring at beautiful Caribbean blue water and catch up on books when I get home. (Anyone else?)

But I did get a bit of reading done over my morning coffee – a few pages here and there from The Wimsey Papers (which is not a Lord Peter mystery – it’s a collection of letters and “family documents” that Dorothy L. Sayers wrote as one-offs during World War II). Great for spending a little bit more time in Lord Peter and Harriet’s world, as long as you don’t expect an actual plot. (I went in knowing what to expect, so I was completely satisfied.) On the plane home, I read Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why, which turned out to be a collection of Alexandra Petri’s Washington Post columns, most of which I had already read when they came out in the newspaper. But time spent with Alexandra Petri is always worthwhile and I blazed through, alternately chuckling and cringing, as we winged our way back to the U.S. Then finally, once home and back to perusing my shelves, I felt like spending more time with Lord Peter, so I picked up Clouds of Witness, which was one of the Wimsey mysteries that I missed when I read a bunch of them in high school. It’s been a busy couple of days of running around doing post-travel re-entry, so I’m only about fifty or so pages in, but of course it’s wonderful.

Totally in love with scuba diving! We had an amazing week exploring the glorious, vibrant, and healthy Mesoamerican Reef that rings Roatan Island. Can’t wait to go back and dive more!

Hey, look at this – a gallery of book covers instead of a picture of just Shirley again! I finally had a pretty decent reading week – attention, time, and ability to avoid doomscrolling were all on my side. At the end of the day, I really, really loved Shirley. It just took me awhile to get into it, and trying to read via a big omnibus collection was not a good strategy. Full review coming Wednesday, so I will reserve further thoughts for that post.

I was out of town last week, visiting my folks for the Fourth of July (we love getting up to the lake during the summer when we can and the timing worked out for us to be there over the holiday weekend this year – always fun) so I stuck with digital reading, getting through A Quiet Life in the Country, by T.E. Kinsey – a fun, light mystery starring a new-to-me sleuthing duo – and Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery on Audible. Loved the story, but the narrator wasn’t my favorite; she was fine, and the narration was great, but some of her character voices grated on me. Apparently I’m on a mystery jag right now, because when I wrapped up A Quiet Life and Caribbean Mystery (both on Sunday!) I turned to Dorothy L. Sayers and The Wimsey Papers. It’s short – just a collection of fictionalized letters and family documents that Sayers published as one-offs during World War II, some of which seem to have been an excuse for her to flex her philosophy muscle. I’m really enjoying it and will probably wrap it up this evening. And then what? No idea.

Fireworks! Hope you had a great Fourth, if you were celebrating. It’s really summer now!

Are you all getting tired of seeing another post headlined by Shirley and no other books? Me, too, fam. Me, too. Clearly I bit off more than I could chew when I decided, you know what, I think I have the time and attention span right now for a doorstopper. The problem is, most of the books left on my Classics Club list are doorstoppers, and I’m getting down to the wire – I have exactly one year left on the challenge and I seem to have left all the really, really loooooooong books for last. Figures.

Anyway, I decided that trying to read Shirley in my omnibus volume of Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s complete novels was making it harder – it’s not easy to focus on a Victorian classic while constantly shifting positions around to get comfortable holding a massive tome. I read at the kitchen table for a few nights, which served me well when I read War and Peace about ten years ago, but a lot has happened in the intervening years and the kitchen table is not as cozy and welcoming of a place as it used to me. (If you must know, what has happened is two kids: the kitchen table is now permanently sticky no matter how many times I clean it.) So I downloaded a free ebook of Shirley to my kindle and am now reading much more comfortably, and – magic – my reading speed has picked up! I’m about three-quarters of the way through and will definitely finish it in the next couple of days. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m reading more comfortably on an e-reader than in a giant volume, but it also feels like the story has picked up and gotten more interesting, too. Looking forward to some time relaxing with Shirley today, and maybe I’ll even get ‘er done.

Happy Fourth, American friends! I feel a little sheepish these days admitting that Independence Day is my FAVORITE holiday, but there it is. It used to be second behind Christmas – when I was a kid – then moved into tie position when I was a young adult, and now as a mom it’s clearly in the lead. (Still love Christmas but it’s become very expensive, pressure-packed, and a LOT of work since kids arrived on the scene. #grinch.) Give me a day on the water, a turkey dog, and some sparklers to close it out. Now that’s a holiday!

No need for a gallery today, because the only book I spent any time with – and it wasn’t much time, to be perfectly clear – over the last week was Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte, which I started last weekend. So I’m now at over a week and counting, and still only maybe a third of the way through? In my defense, it’s been an eventful week in the world – much doomscrolling has happened, and I’ve got to get back to putting my phone on its charging cradle in another room so that I can focus on my book. Multiple evenings last week I was either scrolling through my Washington Post app, researching how to move to Canada, or escaping into long phone conversations with friends or family members. What I was not doing: reading Shirley.

Also in my defense, Charlotte Bronte takes over a hundred pages to introduce the title character. Why?!

Anyway – summer is about to get super busy in these parts, and I don’t want to be toting my gigantic omnibus edition of Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s novels (especially since the publisher made the terrible judgment call of excluding the best Bronte, Anne) – so I need to get after it. I still have several nights of reading left in the book, and that’s best case scenario where I don’t doomscroll at all, so we’ll see how well I even do with that. No idea what’s up next in the book department, either, although I do have the audio version of Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery downloaded and ready to go, and I think that will be in my earbuds before too long.

It’s officially H-O-T in Virginia! Good thing we have somewhere to beat the heat.

What are you reading this week?

Survival mode is gradually (slowly) dissipating, energy levels are gradually (slowly) returning, and it was a pretty good week in books. I wrapped up A Room of One’s Own early in the week and then spent a few days over Rhododendron Pie, Margery Sharp’s light and funny first novel. I didn’t love it as much as Cluny Brown, but that’s not really saying much because I absolutely adored Cluny Brown. Still really loved Rhododendron Pie.

By the end of the week, I – somewhat surprisingly – had enough brainpower to make a doorstopper actually realistic, and I’ve been meaning to get to Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (off the Classics Club list – see me cruising?). I’m just at the very beginning, but Bronte’s “workaday” novel of “Monday morning” is promising indeed. Basically, it seems to be North and South, but make it Bronte? I’m interested.

Not sure what’s on deck after Shirley, because it’s way too soon to tell. I’m sure I’ll be wanting something short, but what it will be – time will tell.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads!

What are you reading this week?