BOOKISH THOUGHTS AND UPDATES

Hello my lovely readers!

Here's just  a few bookish thoughts and updates on my mind....

1. Differences in reading habits
   Since discovering Libby, getting a Kindle and becoming a mother, my reading habits have changed dramatically!
   
   For example, on my recent re-read of Plum Bun, this year, I was able to get through the book in roughly four days. That's half the time it took for me to read it back in 2022 when I only read the physical version and didn't have a child. I mean 10 days to read a book, isn't anything to sneeze at (in my opinion), especially when you have a full-time job, an active social life, are planning a wedding and researching genealogy. 
   
   This second read of Plum Bun,  I got through quicker because I was constantly reading it, thanks to its audiobook. I love doing an audio/physical read because I am able to get through books quickly. When I'm driving, cleaning or getting dressed, I'm listening to it on audio. And when I have the chance to sit down and read...I read it! I still feel guilty if I'm listening to too much of it on audio, because I just love physical books! I want to make sure I'm giving them equal attention. Ha!
   
   Is it odd to say that sometimes I get intimidated by books that have no audiobook? Yes, it is, but this is where I am in life. I just have to give myself grace and time to get through it. Lord knows, Zora Neale Hurston's biography and Langston Hughes' biography don't have audiobooks, but that just means I get to take my time with them.
   
   
2. My Favorite Books of All Time!
   If anyone ever asks me what are my favorite books I can immediately say these: Plum Bun, The Ice Cream Girls, The Awakening, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I've recently re-read them all and UGGGGGGHHHHH, I just love them so much!
   
   
3. Reading Challenges for 2026
   I've unintentionally joined numerous reading challenges this year. I'd planned on only doing the 10 Books 10 Decades Challenge, 12 Lives Challenge and the Personal Five ReRead Challenge.
   
   But now....I've joined 50 States, Reading Europe, Read Africa Month (May), Mega May, Read Across the Caribbean, Hefty Tomes, and the Asia Reading Challenge.
   
   I should clarify that I'm using the above challenges more as trackers than anything else. So far, I've read 15 states, 3 European countries, no African authors (yet), no 500 plus page book (yet for May), no Caribbean authors, one Hefty Tome and 7 Asian countries.
   
   Hopefully by the end of the year, I can beef up these stats...but no pressure!

Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

Hello my lovely readers!

This book missed the mark for me. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served his time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down.

Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind a Raisin in the Sun by Charles J. Shields

 

Hello my lovely readers! This is yet another biography NOT on part of my 12 Lives Challenge. Sigh. At this rate, I might as well redo my list for the challenge because thus far, I've only read one off my planned list. Yikes! Let's get into this biography!

SYNOPSIS
Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the 100 most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Yet so much of her life has escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband--her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues she struggled about class, sexuality, and race with are relevant and urgent today.

This dramatic telling of a passionate life-- a very American life through self-reinvention-- uses interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries, and to raise new questions about a life not fully described until this, the authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry.

QUICK REVIEWS PT. IX

 Hello my lovely readers! It's time for some more quick reviews! Lets get into it.

The Finalist by Joan Long
Five authors each with their own secrets, are chosen to complete a deceased novelist’s unfinished manuscript on a remote island as part of a one million dollar contest. But then someone dies and accusations fly.

*Meh. It was entertaining enough. A simple vacation or beach read, but it felt pretty thin. 3 out of 5 stars

Strange People on the Hill by Michael Edison Hayden
A gripping story that reveals what happened to a small American town when an influential white nationalist group relocated its headquarters there, illustrating how radical changes in American politics impact our psyches and divide our communities.

*Too much of a memoir with random bits on Berkeley Springs sprinkled throughout it. Also, way too heavy on the social media aspect of everything. I feel as though there's a way to talk about how residents thought/felt without reducing it to social media fights. 2 out of 5 stars

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World Elif Shafak

 

Hello my lovely readers! More and more books are coming off my personal shelves and I'm so happy. This is one of them. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active--for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life--and the lives of others, outcasts like her.

Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.

In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe

 

Hello my lovely readers! Patrick Radden Keefe never misses. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Hello my lovely readers! Re-reading this as an adult made me fall in love with this book. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior—to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into ten languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.