It's Monday 5/23! What Are You Reading?

Presented by The Book Date

It was reassuring to be home all week after four weeks three weeks after four weeks of rehearsals. Although my chronic illness was improving, the whole trip was still too much for me after finally recovering from the late effects of COVID through my doctor. I feel like I'm back to a "normal" baseline, still sleeping a lot and requiring daily sleep, but for some reason my stamina is pretty low after almost two years of relapse. So I enjoy being at home, sleeping in my bed and starting out with a few short walks but lots of light exercise.

Lately my main activity has been weeding the gardens (gradually). After this busy month they got a little bigger. All in all I was touched by all its beautiful colors this spring. Last spring I was a little impressed by what I read about the potential of planting local plants in Dosta Talami's book , Nature's Best Hope . Last May I bought a bunch of plants from our local nature center's annual plant sale and it took us a month to sell them all. However, all that hard work paid off this spring when they all returned. some were larger than last year. - It bloomed beautifully. A little hint.

Flaxen blue anemone planted white last spring

New blue canvas և old yellow daffodils

The blue magnesium frost flower planted last spring is finally in full bloom.

My sad azaleas! About 15 years old - still small but growing.

This year our purple irises are going crazy. I love her!

Another important thing in my life... this is my annual Summer Book Reading Challenge which starts on Friday May 27th . It's the 10th anniversary of the competition, so I've got some fun surprises planned for the end of summer, including a double gift - some great Big Book Summer products I'll be showcasing on Friday. At the same time you can see the new logo that I created this year.

If you're unfamiliar with the Great Book Summer, it will be a fun and easy challenge to take part (even if you live in the Great Book Winter). The Big Book is 400 pages or more, և You can read just one or as many as you like in the second season. I like to pick an entire collection, including the classics, and dedicate the summer to wonderful books, even if I haven't read them all yet. The details will be explained in my blog post on Friday (և I will post a video on YouTube), but this time you can check out my post on Book Summer 2021 .

So take a look at your bookshelves and reading lists: to see if there are great books you want to read.

Oh, և Big Book Summer և I'm on the Book Cougars podcast this week. Her new episode will air on Tuesday May 24th. The host, Chris և Emily, interviewed me when I was on Booktopia so check it out, this is a great book podcast by the way.

Last week I uploaded two new videos to my YouTube channel.

Booktopia 2022 at the Northshire, Virginia Bookstore in Manchester sums up our weekend in a fantastic book full of books, authors, photos and videos.

Read Friday 5/20/22 - I have a short weekly update on what I've read in print

Here's what we all read this week.

For my book group I finished Kim Michelle Richardson's Woman with a Difficulty with Cream and I enjoyed it. In 1936, at the age of nineteen, Cousin worked as a horseradish librarian at WPA, bringing books to his remote Appalachian neighbors east of Kentucky. Casey is the last woman in the Blue Kentucky family to have a genetic defect that causes blue skin. I had to go to Wikipedia to see it - it's all factual, including how Troublesome Creek was made. This is a beautiful historical novel that will delight both truck librarians and blue people who are terribly discriminated against. Casey is an amazing heroine who spreads the joy of reading and writing to her very poor, isolated community. The poverty described here during the Great Depression was terrible, so there are many sad scenes, but also joy that ends with a touch of hope. My book group gave it an average of 7.5 (10 points), I'm still thinking about that five days after graduation.

I also finished Courtney Maum Horse Year, one of our Booktopia collections, which I had to take off for a while to read my group book. This is the memory of the author's personal struggle against the Great Depression. Insomnia and other symptoms eventually worsened, so he sought help. Looking back, he realized he had struggled since childhood. Through therapy, he returned to his childhood hobbies - horseback riding - to help him recover. Finally he dived into the world of sex. This is an interesting and amazing story.

Before starting my Great Books this summer, I adapted Charles Yu's short book, How to Live Safely in the World of Science Fiction , which is my husband's Christmas present. I heard about it on BookBub's Constructive Science Fiction list. I like everything about time travel so it was perfect for me. This is definitely a one-of-a-kind book. Let's start with the fact that the main character's name is Charles Jude, he is a car mechanic of the time. He goes everywhere when people are in trouble or need help. However, the main goal of his life is to find his lost father, one of the first inventors of time travel, before he disappears. So far, so good.

As for the audio, I started listening to a new book. Before you go back to the Big Books (yes, sound included), try to write this out briefly. I'm listening to Alexandra Monirin's Final Six , YA's post-apocalyptic novel. In the near future, climate catastrophes have finally reached a turning point. The sea has risen, it is rapidly moving inward, and now it is impossible to save the earth. Plan B involves sending a team of six teenagers into space to establish a colony on one of Jupiter's moons that could save lives in Europa. The group of 24 best and brightest teenagers were selected to attend the International Space Camp. The last six people are elected. The story revolves around two of 24 people: Leon, an Italian swimmer grieving the loss of his family, and Naomi, a brilliant computer science student whose goal in life is to find a cure for her brother's heart disease. As teenagers trained and competed for the top six spots, I was completely immersed in the story.

My husband, Ken Lauren Bucks, read The Land of God . I chose this one because we both liked the movie TheShining Girls by the same author, we were very excited for the new TV adaptation that just came out on Apple TV starring...Elizabeth Moss. So far we're surprised. Buches' new novel, on the other hand, is a post-apocalyptic story about a world in which many people have died. A 12-year-old boy named Miles is one of the few remaining boys, and his mother will protect him from the many women who want their share as a scarce reproductive resource, sex object, or surrogate son at any cost. . It's being described as a "smartly written" high-risk thriller, as Stephen King puts it, so it would be great. Kenny liked it.

Ken also plans to launch the Great Book edition on Friday. At the same time, he reads a few stories from Hugh Howe's Machine Learning Collection, my favorite book. There are odd stories in this collection, mostly sci-fi ((a story about rumba, which is still very knowledgeable, surprises me). The collection also includes three new stories from Howie's best-selling Power trilogy (all three books are suitable perfect for Great Book Publishing), starting with one of my best books of all time, Wool... hope you like it.

This morning our son (27 years old) told me that Michael G. Manning has finished reading The Magic Choice from his new series The Art of Adaptation . He said he liked it so much that he immediately started buying Book 2, Secrets - Magic . He finds my Big Book Summer Challenge funny because he usually reads no fewer than 400 pages.

I'm way behind on reviews so I made a new blog post last week.

Artistic review. Kate Quinn's Diamond Eye is an interesting historical fiction about a Russian female sniper during World War II.

What you read on Monday is included in Catherine's book history, so be sure to check out her blogs on Monday and get involved. You can also join the YA version for kids/teen/provided by Unleashing Readers.

You can follow me on Twitter @SueBookByBook or on my blog page on Facebook.

What are you and your family reading this week?