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WWW Wednesday | Weekly Wrap Up

On October 10, 2018 By Kristan @ Lit ListeningIn Fiction, Nonfiction, Wrap Ups7 Comments

It’s WWW Wednesday, a tag hosted on Taking on a World of Words It’s easy to do, just answer the three questions below! This is late and also the only post I’ve had since last week because I went into a “first-autumn-cold coma,” but I’m alive now! (Sort of)

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WWW Wednesday | Weekly Wrap Up

On October 3, 2018October 3, 2018 By Kristan @ Lit ListeningIn Fiction, Nonfiction, Wrap Ups11 Comments

It’s WWW Wednesday, a tag hosted on Taking on a World of Words It’s easy to do, just answer the three questions below! My post is coming to you a little bit later than I hoped because I finished two things yesterday, so I had to amend all of my answers.

Continue reading “WWW Wednesday | Weekly Wrap Up” →

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✨Book review (4 months in the making)✨ I first put the Sharp Objects audiobook on hold on Sept. 3. But because adaptations are the bane of my existence, I didn’t get it until this year. /endrant • If you’ve lived under a rock and somehow missed the synopsis, this book follows a reporter Camille who goes back to her hometown to investigate the case of a murdered girl and a newly missing girl. Family drama and small town antics ensue. • So, to start with the positive, this book was compulsively readable. I’ve read the rest of Gillian Flynn’s bibliography, so I knew I got along well with her style, but this was her first book, so you never know. It’s no surprise at all that someone read this book and thought “This has to be a TV show.” • But, saying that, there were times in here where the made-for-TV dramatic scenes came with a side of “well that’s crazy and intense, but why is it happening? How did we get here?” Looking back at the all the twisty dark scenes after finishing the book, I realize several of them seem to serve no purpose other than to elicit a “WTF?” response. They didn’t serve the plot or even character development. We already knew our characters were deeply flawed. • Overall, I think I’ve seen a season (*cough* or 13) too many of crime procedurals to be shocked by anything in here. On top of that the annoying AF bad journalist tropes had me eye rolling so much they almost got stuck. I’d still recommend reading it for a “fun” thriller, if only to compare it to the TV show. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Introducing my next commute read: Signs Preceding the End of the World ☠️🌵 • City dwellers: do you reserve books to read on your commute or do you just take whatever book you’re reading at the time? • This petite book (only 96 pages plus a translators note!) follows Makina, a young woman who is smuggled into the US to search for her brother, and explores the crossings and those who make them, “especially when there’s no going back.” It’s been 10 years since this was originally published, but it’s still as timely as ever. I’ve heard its style is a bit polarizing, so I’m intrigued to know where I fall. Here’s hoping I can make some good progress in this this week (my commute isn’t quite long enough to make this a guarantee). • #currentlyreading #amreading #trainread #signsprecedingtheendoftheworld #yuriherrera #mexicanliterature #unreadshelfproject2019 #bookcover #bookworm #readersofinstagram #tbr

It’s not everyday that a writer will so immediately and so fully enrapture my mind. ~Dual book review~ • Lacy M. Johnson did that to me last week. I started The Reckonings with every intention of taking the essay collection slowly, reading an essay or two a day. A day went by and I’d finished the book, looked up which local bookstore had a signed copy, and bought and listened to her other memoir on Audible. I’m obsessed. • Johnson’s account of her kidnapping and rape by “the man that she lived with” is harrowing. She is so unflinching in her detailing of the effects of her trauma. The story flickers and fragments just like her own mind must when recounting her past. Her language is spare and tactful, and this brief memoir is all the more powerful for it. • And in The Reckonings, she manages to weave together broad ideas of justice and mercy and hope through the tellings of tragedies big and small. She tells the stories of 9/11, terminally ill children, Hurricane Harvey, rape victims and more by tugging on the thread that holds them all together (the titular “reckoning”). She lets those stories stand on their own without the need to wax poetic about her “point.” • Needless to say, these books will stay with me a long time.

✨Weekend reads🌨 . . Happy Saturday, everyone! It’s supposed to snow around here this evening through tomorrow so I got all my errands out of the way this morning and am now settling in with my books 📚 . What are you reading this weekend? I’m about a third of the way through My Sister, The Serial Killer so far and am enjoying it. It’s not quite as biting as I hyped it up in my head, but we’ll see how it turns out. . . . #currentlyreading #amreading #mysistertheserialkiller #oyinkanbraithwaite #weekendreading #bookstagram #instabooks #readersofinstagram

✨Book review✨ I like to say “I was born in the South, but I’m not a product of the South.” So I know good food but I am also at a distance where I can easily detach and see its flaws. So when I read books like this that viscerally remind me of my roots and of my family, there’s a tendency to feel conflicted. But, this book was full of the good food and family and left the white supremacy in the freezer to unpack another day. 🍅 I’ve enjoyed Rick Bragg’s books since they were assigned in my journalism program. So when I saw he was writing a memoir/cookbook about his family, I knew I’d eventually read it. (If only because after a year in DC I’ve yet to find any mac n’ cheese or biscuits that are worth a damn. DC ‘grammers: hook me up please!) 🍽 What I got when listening was major deja vu. I had so many moments of “are you sure you’re not talkin’ about my own grandma?” in the first 3 chapters that I stopped keeping track. He captures the personality of the matriarchs in his family with such skill that it’s like I knew them in the end. You can hear his momma piping up when he asks “dumb” questions about the recipes she never wrote down for herself. Even the recipes themselves are infused with their voices. 🥧 With the recipes comes a memoir of a poor white family living and cooking their way through the 1900s. Bragg details a little of the wider world, with snippets of “the black diner on the other side of the tracks was also serving up the same food,” but his focus is what he knows: the stories of his family, in a sort of time capsule. 🍖 This is a memoir of his family, and without meaning, to it’s a memoir of the South. But only the good parts. The hospitality and the unpretentious charm. There’s this feeling of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” which sounds quaint – but only if you don’t look too hard. 🍑 All of that to say is I’ll be putting it in the hands of my mother and aunts as soon as I can. And I need to bake some biscuits - stat!

Welcome to the BotM family, Maid! My pick of the month finally arrived today. The other options didn’t pique my interest but I’m usually safe with the nonfiction selections, so enter Maid: the story of a working class mom. I’m curious to see how well the author navigates all the nuances of the wage gap and poverty problem or if she only keeps to her own experience. . . #botm #bookofthemonth #maid #nonfiction #memoir #bookshelf #bookcollection #bookstagram #instabooks

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