It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? 1-15-24

Apparently, in my haste last Monday to write a post on my lunch hour using the WordPress app on my iPad, I forgot to clone the “It’s Monday, What Are You Reading” post template, and saved over it, making every Monday January 8th, 2024 from now on. Having to recreate the template was just another way to procrastinate, though, because even though today is a holiday for me, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I had all weekend off, too, I was still late starting this blog post today, and it’s practically lunchtime already.

We are getting ready for a trip to England — London and then Blackpool – and trip planning has been taking up all my free time. In addition to planning must-see sights, must-try food, and places to go for drinks (apparently the Porn Star Martini is the most popular cocktail in London) I like to read books and listen to audiobooks set in the place I’m traveling to. I have a package coming with the following books (paperback for travel). The first two are short and ones I thought my husband might like to share with me on our plane flights and train rides while we’re traveling.

After spending a lot of time browsing online (mostly using the lists on this great site called Mappit, a geographic database of book settings) I have a package coming with the following books (paperback for travel).

The first two are short classics that I thought my husband might like to share with me on our plane flights and train rides. The Casual Vacancy has been on my TBR since it came out (over ten years ago!). (It may be too big to pack, because I couldn’t find it in a mass-market paperback size, either, but we’ll see once I start actually packing…

Check out Mappit’s list of books set in London (7,093 of them.)

I added Funny Girl by Nick Hornby to my possibilities, but couldn’t find a mass-market paperback to buy, so tagged the audiobook to borrow from the library instead. (Funny Girl is set in London but has a heroine from Blackpool, the other spot in England where we’ll be spending time.)

Then I remembered a book I had picked up at a secondhand bookstore on one of our trips somewhere, Book Lust to Go by Nancy Pearl, which is all about geographical settings of books – fiction and nonfiction.

After lamenting how hard it was to decide what books to include in the limited space she had for her section on England, the author suggests (among many others) the book London by Edward Rutherfurd, which is a doorstopper of historical fiction. I’ve tagged the audiobook for downloading from the library, but since it’s over 49 hours long, I might stick to my original plan to listen to Funny Girl instead, which is just over 10 hours long.

Currently Reading

Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young

A deeply atmospheric story about ancestral magic, an unsolved murder, and a second chance at true love – the Publisher

Spells for Forgetting was a Christmas gift from my husband. I had never heard of the author before, but she is apparently well known in the book blogging community! The book is my bedside table reading, but I may need to move it to lunchtime reading if I want to finish it this month.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

The Once and Future King by T.H. White is a compilation of four shorter books, first published together in 1958. I don’t reread books very often, but I selected this one to read again now for two reasons.

First, it’ll give me a headstart on my England reading, because it’s a contemporary classic of alternate history based on the Arthurian legend set in an imagined England of the 14th century.

Second, I’m reading it for the Massachusetts Center for the Book 2024 Reading Challenge. For January, the monthly challenge is to “read a book you read years ago that you may feel differently about now”. The Once and Future King was the book I would always name as my favorite childhood book (after graduating from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Borrowers by Mary Norton, among others) if I were forced to pick just one. But I always thought of it as “ageless” – meaning it can be enjoyed as much by adults as by young people, although often considered children’s literature, and can be read over and over without getting tired of it, like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, or A Wrinkle in Time.

Even though I’ve just started rereading The Once and Future King – almost 700 pages long – as an adult, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to feel differently about it now!

Recently Read

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. – from the Publisher

The Night of the Living Rez: Stories by Morgan Talty won all sorts of prizes and honors after it was published in July 2022. If you liked Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, or There There by Tommy Orange, please put The Night of the Living Rez on your TBR now!

Currently Listening To

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

This funny, poignant, classic love story unfolds through a series of letters between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. – from the Publisher

Enjoying listening to the audiobook edition of 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, narrated by seven different narrators – including a few favorites, Barbara Rosenblat, Davina Porter, Simon Prebble – even though all the talk about reading classics in the original Latin, etc. makes me feel like an illiterate ignoramus. (It’s all in the form of letters – or in epistolary format, if you remember your English lit terminology – so I know one of my sisters would definitely hate this book!)

Hoping to get to Charing Cross Road on one of our London sightseeing days, and maybe visit Any Amount of Books (whose tagline is “Keeping the tradition of secondhand bookselling alive on Charing Cross Road”) and a few other London bookshops. I won’t have any room in my luggage for more books, though! Here’s hoping my husband packs light. 😉

Recently Listened To

The Holiday Swap by Maggie Knox

My review on LibraryThing (3-1/2 stars out of 5): Romantic comedy, holiday baking, twins temporarily swapping lives, and the magic of Christmas…what’s not to like? Suspend your disbelief (which you have to do for most romantic comedies) and enjoy the mishaps and missteps as two twenty-something twin sisters fix each other’s problems and their own, finding true love along the way!

My holds from Christmas are still trickling in from the library! I needed something light after Lisa Unger’s Christmas Presents (highly recommended if you can deal with serial killing and true crime themes). The Holiday Swap by Maggie Knox, read by Stephanie Cannon, was perfect for light holiday reading.

Please let me know what you’re reading in the comments and/or share your blog link! (If you can’t see where to comment, try clicking/tapping on the title of this post to open it in full.)

This post is linked up to It’s Monday, What Are You Reading, hosted by The Book Date. It’s Monday! What Are You Reading is a place to meet up and share what you have been and are currently reading each week. Visit the link-up for more books to your groaning TBR pile.