nomadreader

This year, Mr. Nomadreader and I are starting a new tradition for our family: we hope to visit one new country each year with Hawthorne. Our family is complete, and I'm excited to be starting a new family tradition. Hawthorne will be two and a half next month (!), and we're ready to start showing him the world. Our first destination: Amsterdam, this spring. While we've been studying the guidebooks and planning our days, I've also been busy making lists of fiction I want to read that is set in Amsterdam, both past and present. I've been intrigued by Chris Ewan's The Good Thief series, as each one is set in a different city, but our trip made me pick up his first in the series, The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam.  The titular good thief is Charlie Howard, a novelist who writes books about a globetrotting thief named Faulks. He also secretly works as a thief himself. There is a lot going on in this novel. In its opening pages, Charlie gets an intriguing of...

Books are one of my favorite ways of exploring new places and revisiting familiar places. When I travel, I've always loved to read books set in the place I'm visiting. This year, I'm leading a J-term travel seminar to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The course is the culmination of almost two years of work, and I'm spent a lot of time learning about Thailand. When our flights were finalized, I learned we're flying through Beijing both ways. I began seeking out books about China, and I was intrigued by Susan Conley's memoir about the two years she and her family spent living in Beijing. Conley is a novelist, and I'm drawn to memoirs written by fiction writers. Moreover, I wasn't necessarily interested in immersing myself in China; I wanted to see it through the eyes of a western woman so I could anticipate my own experience with culture shock. I sought answers to the questions I didn't even know to ask. I wanted insight into Chinese culture and the difficulty o...

2016 wasn't my most productive year of reading, but I did manage to read 104 books, which averages out to two a week, and I'm pleased with that. I didn't review most of those, so this post is not full of linked reviews as in years past ,  but I did rate eight of them 5 stars. 19 more were 4.5 star reads. The books I loved were incredibly diverse in genre, so this year, instead of ranking them, I offer my favorites by categories. Dig in! (Pictures take you to Amazon and linked titles take you to my reviews--if I actually wrote one.) Best Comic (tie) Something New  by Lucy Knisley &  Roller Girl  by Victoria Jamieson Best Nonfiction All the Single Ladies  by Rebecca Traister Best Short Story Collection American Housewife  by Helen Ellis Runner Up: Almost Famous Women  by Megan Mayhew Bergman Best Mystery (standalone) Dodgers by Bill Beverly Runner Up: The Kind Worth Killing  by Peter Swanson Best New My...