Weekend/End of Month Update-January

I surprised myself with how quickly I read both War and Peace and KL. This week I read My Antonia by Willa Cather, which was a super quick, beautiful read that took me back to a favorite childhood series: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. Gorgeously written, My Antonia is actually the third in Cather's Prairie trilogy but easily stands alone. It is a story about an orphan boy sent to live in Nebraska with his grandparents and their immigrant neighbors, the Shimerdas from Bohemia, and their life growing up in the newly settled Black Hawk. I may go back at some time to read the first two books in the series: O, Pioneers! and Song of the Lark but I really need to make some progress on my back list, which somehow has grown rather than shrunk this month (read with a small note of sarcasm--haha)

How my list has grown: Working in a bookstore, we receive a good deal of ARCs (Advance Reader Copy) from publishers and I picked up a few the other day to add to my TBR list: Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato, Setting Free the Kites by Alex George, and At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen (which this last one is already published--just an old ARC sitting in our box to share. I loved Sara's Water for Elephants so I'm looking forward to reading this new one.) Who doesn't love free books, right?

I also went on a Barnes and Noble tour this week and visited a couple of our sister stores up in Walpole and Braintree. I love going to see our other stores, how they're set up, all the other beautiful books and merchandise they have that we don't have room to carry in our tiny Dartmouth location. Of course, I can't stop in a bookstore without buying a book or a few, so I picked up 50 Great Short Stories and Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, justified by the notion that I need to read both of these for my reading challenges this year--the short stories for a genre I don't typically read, and Year for my A to Z challenge, I needed a title that begins with a Y. Perfect!

And the final addition to my TBR list this week came from a friend who'd seen I added Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies to my Goodreads Want To Read list, and she surprised me with a copy yesterday! Yay! Thanks so much Courtney!!! So my backlist now contains 127 titles, up from 122 at the start of the year. It might take a miracle to cull it to my goal of 81 books if I carry on in this manner....I can't help myself, I just love books!!

Currently I'm reading Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame. Les Miserables is one of my all time favorites, so I hope this one becomes another love. Do you give classics a chance? Some of them can be a struggle at times to get through, but I find that if I stick it out, I'm rarely disappointed. I suppose they're "classics" for a reason, right?