Here we are at the last Monday of March! Have you started your spring cleaning, or – if you’re on the other side of the globe – your fall spruce-up, yet? (I haven’t, but my husband has, so that’s even better.)
Currently Reading
The Return by Roland Merullo
I’ve been reading The Return by Roland Merullo slowly, with a review copies, book club selections, and overdue library books having to take precedence this month, but I expect to finish it this week.
I won a giveaway of an autographed copy of Roland Merullo’s Revere Beach Elegy. The monthly giveaway open to all Roland Merullo newsletter subscribers for April is Lunch for Buddha. (Sign up for the monthly newsletter on the author’s Web site.)
All the Children Are Home by Patry Francis
Patry Francis is one of my favorite authors, so All the Children Are Home was on my list of Top Ten Most-Anticipated Books of 2021. Patry Francis grew up in the small Massachusetts city I live in now, and came to speak at the library here when The Orphans of Race Point came out in 2014.
I don’t remember how I happened to pick up her first book, The Liar’s Diary (which came out in 2007 and should be brought back into print) and thought it was so good, I made note of the author – then had to wait seven years for her next book! (The Orphans of Race Point was one of my favorite books of 2014 and well worth the wait.)
All the Children Are Home is coming out on April 13, so I hope to have an actual book review post up in time for that. I’ve pre-ordered a print copy for my home collection.
An April Readalong! — #GreenMileAlong
The Green Mile by Stephen King
Not sure how I’m going to fit this in, but when @BkClubCare announced she and @AvidReader25 are hosting an April readalong of The Green Mile by Stephen King, I had to join in! Depending on how my library holds come in, I may read this as an audio/ebook combination.
Recently Read
And the penny drops. I just finished an advance copy of a book for a Library Journal review which I really liked, and noticed it was from Lake Union Publishing – a company which all of a sudden I seemed to be seeing everywhere. Roland Merullo’s recent books were published by Lake Union, and so were many other WWII historical fiction titles that have been so popular with book clubs lately. But I couldn’t find the publisher’s Web site to link to. By now, you’ve probably guessed why, if you didn’t already know.
“Lake Union Publishing” is an Amazon imprint. So searching for these books leads you only to their Amazon sales pages. Sigh.
The book isn’t being released until June 1, so I guess I’ll hold off on a blog review for a while. Here’s the book cover as a sneak preview.
No link, but Amazon probably has a way of automatically getting you to there from here, anyway.
Temporarily Not Reading
A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie
I keep setting A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie aside and renewing the ebook loan from the library. It’s a good book to dip into instead of reading straight through, anyway!
Recently Listened To
Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev
If you like Jasmine Guillory’s romantic comedies with a rotating cast of characters from book to book, you will like Sonali Dev’s modern takes on Jane Austen and the “enemies to lovers” romance trope focused on the Rajes – an Indian-American family in California – in Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors (2019) and Recipe for Persuasion (2020). Both are narrated on audio by Soneela Nankani, and I hope she does the next one, too, coming out in July – Incense and Sensibility.
Currently Listening To
28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand
I had been waiting a long time for 28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand to come in from the library and have also kept postponing delivery because it kept coming at a bad time. Finally I downloaded it, started listening, and after hearing the beginning decided I knew what was going to happen and wouldn’t bother listening to the rest because I had two other audiobook holds that had just come through that I had also been waiting a long time for and didn’t want to expire. I’m on Part 5 of 17, though, and still haven’t stopped. Is it the narration by Erin Bennett, the beach-house-on-Nantucket setting, or the author’s storytelling skill that’s keeping me hooked? I’m not sure.
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!
