Devouring books

I’ve been on a bit of a reading kick lately. I just finished The Luminaries and am over halfway done with The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. I recommend them both — the first if you like Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the second if you ever dated any “intellectual” boys in your post-college, pre-marriage days (or if you were one of those boys…).

I’ve also been on a book buying binge this year. Now that Amazon has helpfully linked all my recent book purchases to Goodreads for easy import, I can see exactly how big my “virtual” TBR* pile has grown. I somehow have collected fifty books — 50! — on my virtual “to read” shelf. There is no way I’ll be able to read that many books this year… yet I still want to read them all!

I can’t believe that I still haven’t read the final book of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy (Dreams of Gods and Monsters),. It came out in April and I pre-ordered it… I have several others like it on my list (The Golem and the Jinni, Shadow and Bone, Arclight, The 5th Wave, etc.) that I was so excited to read. But then I kept striking out every YA and/or dystopian and/or fantasy book I read in the first part of this year. They all started to sound exactly the same. When Dreams of Gods and Monsters finally arrived I think I was worried that somehow I’d be utterly disappointed in the final book of that series. So I gave up on the dystopias and read an (adult) space opera (House of Suns) which renewed my thirst for reading.

Now it appears that I’m sort of on a “literary fiction” kick. Since that seems to be working for me, I think next up it’s going to have to be The Goldfinch and/or We Were Liars. Or maybe I’ll finally get around to reading Franny and Zooey. I’ve only been meaning to read that one since Christmas…

Good thing we have a three day weekend this weekend. If you need me, I’ll be sitting in a lawn chair on my patio, reading.

(* TBR = “to be read”)