All articles filed in my reading life

This month let’s give thanks to our reading brain! I needed a nonfiction fix, so I perused my Kindle library and found Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryann Wolf. “WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with…

This year I’m going to try something different. Besides books, I’d like to share essays I’ve read from around the web, as well as any novels I stopped reading. When I joined StoryGraph, I found that to be an interesting option, so why not include them as well? The Rook by Australian author, Daniel O’…

This month I finished two fiction and one non-fiction book. Woohoo! Let’s go! The Night Tiger has all the delicious elements that I enjoy and seek in historical fiction. Written by Malaysian Yangsze Choo, The Night Tiger is set in 1930s Malaysia and is essentially about a missing finger. The story follows a young dressmaker,…

Fact: When I get away from the internet washing machine, I get more reading done. Generally speaking. Although, I have been known to just pass out at nine or look at on my phone before bed. Bad, Lani, bad! Anyway, after reading a Western, I needed something different. In the past, Agatha Christie was my…

I loved Project Hail Mary! How can I talk about this without giving anything away? And that ending! I didn’t even know that Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian had written another book. Wait, what? He wrote ANOTHER book between The Martian and Project Hail Mary? And it was voted best sci-fi of the year…

Happy New Year and Happy Chinese New Year! Year of the Tiger and a year of dropping all of the reading challenges. Maybe when I’m no longer working full-time, I can try them again, but until then, I’ll read with no goals in mind. One Book Lane truly summarizes this series best, “Hunger Games meets…

How fast is this year flying by? The witch’s broomstick is already in the distance, past Halloween’s moon. This month I read another long book and a children’s story that I read to my third grade class. That counts too, doesn’t it? First up, The Widow Queen by Elzbieta Cherezinska, translated from Polish to English…

A busy month = just one book and a trail of abandoned books. Do you give up on novels? As a child of the 80s, I grew up during the Cold War, which sounds dramatic, but this simply meant that the enemy in films and television were almost always the Russians. I’m not sure if…

Just two books, but updates, and a couple of scams to be aware of are included in this month’s roundup. Books read in May At the recommendation of Jeremy (who at this point should be receiving a commission) I read Shadow and Bone in 2019 and then binge-read almost all of Leigh Bardugo’s books on…

Whoa. April is almost over. The year is 2021, the coronavirus is still outwitting governments, and AI has juuust about taken over people’s abilities to think independently. What’s a girl to do? Well, you do what you’ve been doing ever since you were 13 and realized the world was going to do its thing regardless…

A groovy month of beautiful books, my StoryGraph, and how to get out of your literary echo chamber. In January’s Reading Roundup, I shared StoryGraph, an alternative to Goodreads that puts your reading into these colorful and interesting graphs and charts. Now that the first quarter has passed, I thought I’d share what mine looks…

Short month means short books! Ha! I read four books this month. Three were fairly short, under 300 pages while one was over. Two of the books I read with my teenage students, who are studying literature with me online, which means the other two were for my nighttime reading. First up was Out of…

Current status: reading obsessed! Since I enjoyed reading about other people’s reading lists from 2020, but reading challenges are a bit too much to commit to, I thought it would be fun to start a monthly reading roundup (let’s see how this goes). I’ve also signed up for The Story Graph which is a Goodreads…