Reading Fever

I decided to take a few days off from the blog. I’m going through a fanatical reading phase where I go from one book to the next and it’s hard once you get going to break the cycle. I finally finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and while I loved it, I think some of it was lost because I was reading a few minutes here and there and didn’t have time to just take it in for longer stretches at a time. However, I didn’t want it to end and for days I kept wondering about what happened to the characters because it ended without resolution. Maybe she’ll bring them back for us someday. It’s so hard for me to review books because I don’t want to give anything away.

From there I finished Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. I started this book when it first came out last spring but I had a lot of trouble getting into it – so many characters to keep track of and then bouncing between the present and past got a bit confusing. I decided to put it back on my digital library hold list and I’m glad I did because halfway through I didn’t want to put it down. The characters clicked with me and I was anxious to find out what was happening to all the women of Beckford, a rural English town. A note about Kindle books. A friend gave me a great tip that I was able to utilize with this book. If you’re not going to read it by the deadline, turn the reader to airplane mode and you won’t lose the book. This has saved me so many times over the past year!

2017 could be called the year of the unreliable narrator/psychological suspense for me. I can’t get enough of this genre and the next two books were ready from the library: The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine and Best Day Ever by Kaira Rouda. Once I opened Best Day Ever, I couldn’t put it down. I started it at about 12:30 on Sunday afternoon (after Liam’s last basketball game of the weekend) and finished 12 hours later (much to the chagrin of my family who didn’t see much of me that day). I had a new love seat delivered for my home office area on Sunday morning and that’s where I spent the day, a cup of tea in hand! This is my new nest so good luck getting me out of it.

Best Day Ever was told from the point of view of the husband and he was planning a weekend away for him and his wife without their kids. Right away we pick up there’s something amiss between the two of them and that the marriage isn’t all perfection. It was a page-turner and the chapters were short and just begging to continue which is probably why I barely moved from my new reading spot that day. I brought it to bed after taking time out to fix dinner and chat with the boys and even though I was falling asleep, every time I put it down and turned the light off, I would be wide awake again and so that’s how I ended up finishing it that night.

Yesterday I started The Last Mrs. Parrish and this is proving to be a page-turner too but I’m trying to be cognizant I have other things to do (work, talking to my family, seeing friends). Besides always having a hardcover book going, I try to have something going on my Kindle so I can read if I wake in the night without having to turn the light on. I have Glass Houses by Louise Penny started but I didn’t realize this is a series about a detective and it’s actually book 13. I don’t like starting a series at the end but now that I’ve started I think I better keep going and if I like it I can go back and read the others. Doesn’t that sound amazing? Twelve more books in a series just waiting in the wings.

Happy reading!

MC