It's Monday 5/19! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Whew, what a hectic week!  I spent all last week getting everything ready for the 2025 Big Book Summer Challenge! This annual reading challenge I’m hosting for the 13th year officially kicks off this Friday, May 23. But we have two back-to-back trips, starting last Friday (we got home last night and leave again tomorrow morning!), so I had to get everything ready ahead of time. Start checking your shelves and TBR list for those bigger books (400 or more pages) you’ve been wanting to read that you never seem to get to!

Friday morning, we drove to the Catskills to meet up with my family. My mom rented a house up there so that our whole family could celebrate her birthday with her. There were 16 of us sharing the house, which could have been challenging (ha ha) but ended up being a whole lot of fun! It was my family (including my sons’ girlfriends), my sister’s family, my mom and her husband, and my aunt and uncle and their two daughters. The cousins (i.e. the younger generation) especially enjoyed hanging out together all weekend and partying together. They all get along really well and are very close, so this was great for them. And it was fun for the rest of us, too!

All 16 of us!

The weather turned out great. We kayaked, played cornhole, hung out on the big deck, ate LOTS of big meals (this rental actually had a table big enough for all 16 of us), and talked and laughed a lot.

Hanging out on the deck

My husband and I took kayaks out on the little pond

My cousin and my son play cornhole

My mom with my two sons

Saturday night, we did karaoke. I have never done karaoke before! I should have known I’d love it because I love singing along to music (loudly, not necessarily well ha ha). It was SO much fun!! My sister did my favorite anthem with me, I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor, and I was incredibly impressed by my cousins’ amazing performance of Fergilicious (without looking at the words!). On the way home, as we listened to the radio, I kept saying to my husband, “Ooh, that would be a great karaoke song!” I’m hooked.

My sister and I singing karaoke with our mom

 

My husband and our son singing karaoke

My health mostly cooperated (thanks to keeping up my routines of strict diet, naps every day, and all my usual meds). While I did have to go to bed much earlier than everyone else, it was still after midnight both nights when I finally turned out my light (I usually only make it to midnight on New Year’s Eve). Of course, everyone else up up until 2 or 3 in the morning! It’s always strange being the only person at a party not drinking, but after 23 years, I’m used to that. I did get a killer migraine that peaked Saturday evening, but my son came to the rescue with his migraine meds (we have the same diseases and take most of the same meds), so I could do karaoke! 

And, tomorrow morning, we head out again, driving back to NY state, to go to Long Island for our son’s girlfriend’s graduation. We’ll get home Thursday night, just in time to launch Big Book Summer Friday morning! 

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The Quick to Judge Tag – In this unique tag video, I read the first paragraphs from 5 different books to choose my next read. Which one of the five would YOU have chosen based on the beginnings?

Friday Reads 5-16-25: 4 Good Novels, in Print and on Audio – my brief weekly recap of what I am currently reading and recently finished.

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I finished reading Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler (a Booktopia author). It’s an unusual look at a Jewish family, the Altermans, in Vienna that was separated by WWII. Supposedly, they were each killed during the war, but were they? We hear each of their stories, as they each assume they were the lone survivor of their family. Daughter Sonja is grown up and living in London, where she was evacuated  during the war as a child, with her conductor husband, who’s just gone missing. Mom Fania survived a concentration camp and is living in Montreal, talking with another survivor, after fruitlessly searching for her family after the war. Moses, who was just six months old when he was torn from his mother’s arms, is an older man in New York City now, waiting for the birth of his first grandchild and followed by the ghost of his best friend whom he saw shot in front of him as a young man in Prague. And Arnold, the father, is now 99 years old and is suddenly hopeful that his daughter may have survived after he receives a call from an Englishwoman. I read one review where the reviewer flat out stated that they all died, and this was just an imagining, but the official description of the book leaves it more open than that: “A prismatic mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds.” It was very well-written, engaging, and I enjoyed it. I am always fascinated by the theme of parallel universes. It’s a complex novel, so if you want to hear more, I talk about it in my Friday Reads video.

After that heavy subject matter, I needed something lighter, so I am reading The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis. I LOVE Willis’ Oxford Time Travel series, especially Doomsday Book, Blackout, and All Clear (those last two are a two-book series). Those are among some of my all-time favorite books; my reviews are at the links. This newer novel is not part of the time travel series. It’s premise sounds kind of silly: a real alien abducts a bunch of people in and near Roswell during a UFO Festival and makes them drive him (?) somewhere. But, in Connie Willis’ capable writing hands, it’s a gripping story with equal parts suspense and humor. As each new person is added to the group, there are unexpected twists to the story. The alien is, of course, nothing like what we’ve come to expect from movies, and the tone is somewhat farcical at times (as are some of the characters), but with an undercurrent of warmth, kindness, and suspense. I am loving the novel so far and have been having trouble putting it down at night!

I’ve been listening to Anxious People by Fredrik Backman on audio. I very much enjoyed Backman’s A Man Called Ove on audio and Beartown in print (very different books!), but I haven’t read any of his other novels, so I’ve been looking forward to this one. The basic plot is about a bank robber who ends up taking a group of people at an apartment open house hostage, but the focus in this novel is solidly on the characters: the older and younger police officers investigating and searching for the escaped robber, the highly excitable real estate agent who never stops selling, each of the other hostages, and the bank robber himself. Each of them has a complex backstory that helps to explain their behavior. As is typical of Backman, there is a warmth and poignancy to the story, though it is also funny at times. And I’ve been surprised by the unexpected plot twists. I’m enjoying it.

My husband, Ken, is reading another Robert Crais novel that we picked up in a used bookstore on our road trip, Suspect. He’s enjoying getting reacquainted with this author, though he never even took the book out of his suitcase this weekend! He was up late every night with everyone else. 

 Our son, 30, is still rereading the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks, an old favorite of his, in preparation for the latest book (Beyond the Shadows). So, he’s rereading book 1, The Way of Shadows, and book 2, The Shadow’s Way. Not surprisingly, I didn’t have a chance to get an update from him this weekend, but I will see what he’s reading when we visit this week.

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  What are you and your family reading this week?