Hello, friends and happy May! Our winter in Florida is quickly coming to an end... always a bittersweet time for me. The "end of season" events are over and islanders are enjoying a little calm before summer vacationers begin to arrive. Meanwhile, we are packing and getting the house buttoned up for hurricane season....shhhh!
April turned out to be a good reading month for me. In addition to staying current with the War and Peace group read, I managed to finish four other books. One of those books was the nearly 700 page chunkster, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai.
Recent reading//
The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
After reading a couple of long novels, this slim memoir in essays was a welcome change of pace. The essays deal primarily with marriage and family, but Fennelly's sister's untimely death at 39 is also a recurring topic. Some essays are as short as a sentence or two, but I preferred the longer ones.
⭐⭐⭐💫
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Volume 8 by Beth Brower
I've finished and I'm bereft! How long will I have to wait for volume 9?? I've loved spending the past eight months with Emma M. Lion and company, reading one book per month with a small group of readers from Modern Mrs. Darcy book club. I may just start all over again...
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Current reading//
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markoovits
Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, I picked this up on an impulse and read the first 30 pages. It's an easy read, but I'm not completely hooked yet. It's a short novel (just over 250 pages) so I'll keep going for now.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
My yearlong chapter-a-day readalong with Footnotes and Tangents continues. We've passed page 500!
The week ahead//
We'll start our drive north this weekend and arrive in CT by midweek. The kids plan to visit next weekend for Mother's Day, then we'll be off to see my mother in central NY on Monday morning. It's going to be a busy couple of weeks, so I'll see you back here sometime after mid-month.
How was your week? What have you been reading lately?
