nomadreader

Hi! This post is an "I know I haven't blogged in awhile" update post. Hawthorne is 18 months old! While I haven't been blogging, Hawthorne turned 1 and a half. Life is fun right now. He's so smart and adventurous, and he loves to feel like he's helping. It's a delight to see his sense of accomplishment at small tasks, like when I ask him to get the almond milk out of the refrigerator in the morning while I make my americano. I've gotten really into Snapchat (you can find me there as nomadreader, obviously), and this video gives you a sense of what our mornings and evenings are like. We read a lot of books ( his new favorite .) We build a lot of  farms  and  towns  and take them down and rebuild them. He plays in  his kitchen . I have come to prefer Snapchat to Instagram because life moves quickly, and Snapchat seems to be the perfect way to capture the life of a high energy toddler. Sorry, Instagram--you were so perfect before he was mobile. The...

The basics:  "Pearl doesn't know how she's ended up in the river--the same messy, cacophonous river in the same rain-soaked valley she'd been stuck in for years. But here her spirit swirls and stays . . . Ada, Pearl's daughter, doesn't know how she's ended up back in the house she left thirteen years ago--with no heating apart from a fire she can't light, no way of getting around apart from an old car she's scared to drive, and no company apart from her own young daughter, Pepper. She wants to clear out Pearl's house so she can leave and not look back."--publisher My thoughts: When Weathering  came out in the UK last year, many predicted it would be longlisted for the Baileys Prize. It wasn't, but when it finally was scheduled to come out in the U.S., I was still curious to read it. I picked it up not knowing what it's about, as both the title and cover are ambiguous. If I had read the basic description, I might have realized ...

These days, I tend to listen to NPR in slow bursts, mostly while I'm in the kitchen cooking or cleaning. I've started relying on the NPR One app, which predicts what stories you're interested in, but it also lets you search by topic and show, as well as mark the stories you think are interesting (and skip those you don't.) I also welcome the ability to rewind and fast forward. After using the app for several months, it finally seems to get that I really like stories about fiction (big surprise, right?), but it's been such fun this week to hear interviews with three authors whose books I've enjoyed this month. I read a lot of interviews with authors, but there's something so fascinating to me about hearing them speak. Here are links to those interviews in case you want to take a listen to: Tessa Hadley,  Family Bonds Are Never Bland In 'The Past'  ( my review of The Past) Helen Ellis,  Frisky, Subversive 'American Housewife' Practices S...

The basics:  "On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor--a nomadic, scrappy teenager who's run away from home--sets out to join the throng of WTO demonstrators determined to shut down the city. With the proceeds, he plans to buy a plane ticket and leave Seattle forever, but it quickly becomes clear that the history-making 50,000 anti-globalization protesters--from anarchists to environmentalists to teamsters--are testing the patience of the police, and what started out as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence. Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the fates of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police Chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protesters struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on ...

I'm a huge fan of the Tournament of Books, and yesterday we finally got the "shortlist ." It's seventeen titles, so it's still quite long, but it's a list that excites me much more than the last few years, even if my three top novels of 2015 didn't make it. What's I've Read Thankfully, I've already read three of the titles: Fates and Furies , which I loved ; The Spool of Blue Thread , which was good and fine but not spectacular for me ; and The Story of My Teeth , which has flashes of brilliance and an abundance of ambition, but it wasn’t particularly enjoyable to read . What I Haven't Read That leaves me with fourteen books to read by mid-March if I want to read the entire bracket. Realistically, it's unlikely, but many of the titles I've been meaning to read, and the Tournament of Books may push me to do so. I hope to find time for: The Turner House, The Sellout, The Tsar of Love and Techno, The Invaders, The Sympathizer, ...

The basics: The Expatriates  is the story of the large American expatriate community in Hong Kong, and it's centered around three different women: Mercy, a young Korean-American and recent Columbia graduate adrift in Hong Kong; Hilary, a wealthy housewife struggling to have a baby; and Margaret, a happily married mother of three. My thoughts: Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love to travel vicariously through reading, so I was excited to explore Hong Kong's expatriate community in The Expatriates . The novel certainly delivers on armchair travel, but the reading experience was much deeper and richer than that. It offers so much more than an escapist read set in an exotic world of wealth. The three female narrators are both the heart and backbone of this novel. Each woman is unique, fully realized, and wholly human. I found sympathy with each, but I also found reality in their faults. Although a smaller part of the novel, I found myself enchanted with Lee...

The backstory: My experiences reading Elizabeth Strout have been uneven. I liked Olive Kitteridge , which won the Pulitzer Prize , but I didn't love it, mostly because I wanted more of a novel feeling than interconnected short stories. I was not very fond of The Burgess Boys , despite "beautifully detailed prose and richly developed characters." My review for Amy and Isabelle  hasn't posted yet, but it was my favorite Strout to date. Until My Name Is Lucy Barton. Update: My Name Is Lucy Barton  has been longlisted for the 2016 Baileys Prize . The basics:  "Lucy Barton, a writer, married with two young children, is in the hospital in New York City due to an infection from a simple appendix operation. (Her medical condition is incidental—it’s not about the illness). Her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in years, comes from Amgash, Illinois, to visit her, and sits by her bedside, reminiscing about people she and Lucy know from Lucy’s childhood, before Lucy went of...