It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? 04-18-22 #IMWAYR

Recently Read

I read all three of the books I bought to take on a cruise this past week that was supposed to happen in April 2020.

We had a great time, but cruises might not be the best kind of vacation for a germaphobe like me, especially these days. I’m in bed with a respiratory illness now, hoping it’s not the dreaded Omicron.

Shipped by Angie Hockman

Shipped by Angie Hockman is light reading but with characters that have at least a little depth to them — along the lines of The Ex Talk, which I listened to recently. Two travel company staff members — attracted to each other but competing for the same job promotion — are sent to take a Galapagos Island cruise together, so Shipped was good cruise-ship reading. The main characters have issues to work through before they can acknowledge their mutual attraction, but you know they will.

Shipped didn’t make me laugh as much as Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners or Jasmine Guillory’s rom-coms, but it is my favorite “enemies to friends” type of romance and it has some funny parts!

Tricky Business by Dave Barry

Tricky Business by Dave Barry is set mainly on a sleazy South Florida casino cruise ship, not a gargantuan floating resort such as I was on, but it was perfect for poolside or beach reading, especially with a frozen drink at hand.

Dave Barry’s newspaper column always made me laugh, and his book did too. There is sophomoric toilet humor, raunchiness, graphic scenes of violence, scumbag racist criminals, and a warning from the author to readers right up front that the book contains “bad words”. This might not sound that great, but there are enough decent characters a reader can root for and enough funny scenes to make it a good vacation read.

I would read another Dave Barry novel, but probably not right away!

The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship by Chaney Kwak

The Passenger by Chaney Kwak is the only serious reading I brought with me on vacation. It’s a brief memoir about the author’s experience as a freelance travel writer on a Viking cruise ship when it lost engine power during a bomb cyclone off a dangerous stretch of Norwegian coast. More than a riveting account of a marine disaster, it’s the story of a life-changing 36 hours, covering so much personal, historical, and philosophical territory that it’s hard to believe it’s not even 150 pages long. For anyone who likes to follow up a memoir by reading other nonfiction accounts, the author includes an extensive list of footnotes.

Highly recommended! I hope to see a novel by this author published before long.

Currently Not Listening To

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

This audio expired when I was so close to finishing! Although I loved the narration by Lesley Manville, it may not be worth waiting through the long library holds list again just for the last few minutes, so I might try to read just the ending when I see the print book on the shelf at the library.

Up Next

Anthem by Noah Hawley is going to be my next audiobook, and Black Girls Must Die Exhausted by Jayne Allen is my next book. Both are borrowed from the library.

This post is linked to “It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?” hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date. Check out the link-up party there for more book lists!