My Week in Books 8/26/19 | More

My summer is officially over as I head back to work this week for three long days of meetings and one where I actually get to work in my classroom and get ready for students. I do get Friday off, so have a last hurrah with a four day weekend and then it’s definitely fall in my world. Speaking of fall, my 2019 Fall Preview published last week. If you missed it, I shared 16 books I’m most looking forward to in the next few months. I made the most of my last free week and got A LOT of reading done including three from that preview. In all it was a crazy four book week for me, a feat I don’t think I’ve accomplished since last summer!

Hosted by Kathryn at Book Date

Last Week’s Reads

• I was nearly done with This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger at the start of the week, so finished it in in less than an hour. This is a Depression era story about 4 orphan’s who flee their Minnesota “Indian School” in search of something to call family. Much of the book I really enjoyed, but overall was a little disappointed because I had been expecting so much. Review coming in September.
• I had just the opposite experience with The Secrets We Kept by debut author Lara Prescott. Having no real expectations, her story really delivered. It centers around the writing/publication of Dr. Zhivago and the work done by the CIA to get the book INTO the USSR and into the hands of the Russian people. Full review next week.
• I wasn’t sure about Bad Blood by John Carreyrou when I first mentioned it here last week. Many of you encourage me to stay with it and thank goodness I did. At about the three hour mark, I COULD NOT stop listening! It’s amazing what Elizabeth Holmes got away with. I was so into it that the very evening I finished I watched the HBO documentary about Theranos, The Inventor: Out for Blood in the Silicon Valley. It really capped off the reading and it was nice see so many of the people actually involved in the company’s takedown. I highly recommend both.
• Finally, I read Akin by Emma Donoghue. I was a little nervous about this one because though I’ve loved some of her books, I’ve really disliked others. Luckily, I enjoyed this story of a 79-year old man who suddenly becomes the guardian of an 11-year old great-nephew he had no relationship with, and it happened on the eve of a long planned trip to France. There’s a lot to this story and I’ll cover it much more in my review sometime next month.

Currently Reading

• At the halfway point in Ann Patchett’s latest novel, The Dutch House, I’m really liking it, though it’s not at all what I’d expected. Patchett is one of my auto-read authors with Bel Canto and Commonwealth being two books I especially loved. I’m eager to get back to reading The Dutch House to see how the second half goes and where it falls on my Ann Patchett list.
• For listening I turned to a book I really knew nothing about, but that had incredibly high ratings on Audible, High Achiever by Tiffany Jenkins. Read by the author (who does a fantastic job), this is the story of a woman who became a heavy drug user, lied and stole from people she loved, all while dating a cop. The story opens just after she’s been arrested.

Likely to Read Next

• The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman will be my last September ARC. The others on my TBR list I either want to listen to on audio, or will need to wait for a library hold to come in. This is a bit of a fantastical story about three women during WWII. I’m hoping for great things from Hoffman!

I hope you have a great week in books!

Disclaimer: There are Amazon Associate links contained in this post