It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?
Recently Finished
It took me almost four years to listen to this audiobook from my TBL (To Be Listened to) list – Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, narrated by Robin Miles, one of my favorite audiobook narrators. (I wouldn’t have thought it had been that long, but there’s no denying it; the book came out in August, 2016. I’m not going to delay that long on the author’s 2019 release, Red at the Bone!)
(HarperAudio, 2016)
Another Brooklyn is a beautiful, elegiac novel about growing up female in 1970s Brooklyn, New York, centered around the adult August’s memories of her three childhood best friends from those long-ago days. So short, it may actually be a novella. Highly recommended as an audiobook or in print!
Listen to an audio sample of Another Brooklyn.
I just finished reading Welcome to the Pine Away Motel and Cabins by Katarina Bivald as a downloadable library e-book for a staff book club.
Welcome to the Pine Away Motel and Cabins is Swedish author Katarina Bivald’s second book after The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. This is another heartwarming, bittersweet story of life after loss – with a cast of quirky, often prickly, loners who have to learn how to let down their defenses and stop keeping everyone at a distance.
“Hopeful, heartening, and humane, this is the novel I needed to read right now.” – J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota and Kitchens of the Great Midwest
Currently Listening
If It Bleeds, the new collection of novellas by Stephen King, probably needs no introduction. The first novella in the collection, Mr. Harrington’s Phone, seems so far to be classic King, with a first-person adult narrator looking back on his childhood, including lot of folksy asides, brand name mentions, and a steadily creeping level of horror – enough to make me jump when I hear the creaking of a door or have to go down to the basement.
As an aside, my husband and I watched a couple of seasons of Falling Skies at the start of the Great Lockdown (until we ran out of library DVDs). I kept wondering why the voice of one of the main characters sounded so familiar, when I didn’t recognize the actor’s face from any other shows. It turned out to be Will Patton, who is one of the three narrators for If It Bleeds and was the narrator for The Institute, which I had just been listening to before we started watching Falling Skies. Will Patton has read many other Stephen King audiobooks – so I’ve heard his voice in my head for many hours, over the years! The run time of If It Bleeds is 15 hours and 12 minutes.
Listen to an audio excerpt of If It Bleeds.
Currently Reading
I’m still reading The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith, which I mentioned last week, and have also started Two Thousand Years, a fantasy author by local author M. Dalto.
Please comment to let me know what you’re reading this week. Thank you for visiting!
It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? (#IMWAYR) is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. It’s a place to meet up and share what you have been, are, and about to be reading over the week. It’s a great post to organize yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit and comment, and er… add to that ever-growing TBR pile! This meme started with J Kaye’s Blog and then was taken up by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at Book Date.