It's been kind of a crazy week and I have fallen behind in all my mental plans, so today something easy and next week time to catch up on other things. Other things include July's Stillmeadow ramblings, finishing my "beach" book, telling you about the latest class I took earlier this week and just generally catching up on regular bookchat. I can't seem to get back on to a normal blogging routine. I admit my at home time has been very lazy and I don't much like the laptop I own so am often reluctant to pull it out and work on creating a blog post.
For now, though, here we are in a new month, which I am pleased about. I love turning the calendar from July to August. I am always hopeful that the worst of the summer heat is over and there is the idea of fresh starts and a new school year to look forward to. Fall is my favorite season and it seems well within my grasp suddenly. I am not ready for cold weather, but I am ready for mildness. I won't complain, however. After a difficult week of over 100F days and nasty humidity, things have settled into nice normal (maybe even slightly below average) summer temperatures. Nothing that I can't deal with, or at least feel strongly about complaining about.
With a new month comes a new prompt and an easy one that I don't need to think too hard about (I am never unhappy about thinking hard about books of course). "Something Borrowed" is this month's theme. Unless someone quickly presses a book into my hands with the idea of me reading it and returning it, I get to sort through my current library book pile and here we go. Instant selections. I have a little variety here to choose from.
Desert Heat, J.A. Jance -- I think I was looking at her books at the bookstore. I mean, you can never have enough mystery series to follow, right? And this is the first Joanna Brady mystery. "A cop lies dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun—a local lawman who may well have become the next sheriff of Cochise County. The police brass claim that Andy Brady was dirty, and that his shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna Brady, his devoted wife and mother of their nine-year-old daughter, knows a cover-up when she hears one . . . and murder when she sees it. But her determined efforts to hunt down an assassin and clear her husband's name are placing Joanna and her surviving family in harm's way—because in the desert, the one thing more lethal than a rattler's bite . . . is the truth."
The Saturday Night Ghost Club, Craig Davidson -- . . . this one because I have started watching and am addicted to the first season of Stranger Things! "Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls - a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place - Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turns twelve, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the "Saturday Night Ghost Club." But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly light-hearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined. With the alternating warmth and sadness of the best coming-of-age stories, The Saturday Night Ghost Club is a note-perfect novel that poignantly examines the haunting mutability of memory and storytelling."
Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima -- I would like to read this for my Reading Japan project. It looks really good! "It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become."
Feast Your Eyes, Myla Goldberg -- I love the premise of this story and the way she tells it. "Feast Your Eyes, framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: “America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking.” After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition."
Costalegre, Courtney Maum -- "It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. In the haute-bohemian circles of Austria, Germany, and Paris, Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of “cultural degenerates”―artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime. To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), the impetuous American heiress and modern art collector, Leonora Calaway, begins chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle, where she has a home."
Terrible, Horrible Edie, E.C. Spykman -- "EVEN IF she has lived ten terrible years, terrible, horrible Edie really isn’t terrible and horrible at all, but rather one of the most charming and engaging and gutsy children in American children’s fiction. It’s true of course that Edie does get into—and not always without it being at least a little bit her fault—some pretty terrible and horrible scrapes, and that sometimes she will sulk, but these are the kinds of things that happen to the kid sister of two snooty boys and one fancy-pants girl, not to mention having to deal with the distraction of two half sisters who are no better than babies. Edie’s father and stepmother have headed to Europe for the summer, and though the rest of the family can look forward to good times at a beloved summer house on the sea, Edie still has to fight to hold her own. Adventures on a sailboat and on an island, and the advent of a major hurricane and what Edie takes to be a military coup, all come to a climax when Edie solves the mystery of who stole the neighbor’s jewels and saves, at least for one day, the day."
The last book on the list sounds like a perfect summer read--the kind you squeeze in before vacation ends and you have to go back to school.
Now, though, the problem is how to choose as I want to read them All.