A summer of reading, among other things!

It has been a busy summer - in fact, it's been busy and non-stop.  Heading back to school might even look like a vacation - but not quite! 

Hannah came before school was even out, and we had lots of activities on her bucket list to check off.  Phoebe and family was here for a week or more - which meant that other family members came by too.  I headed out to VA to visit Eliza - the lone sibling who wasn't in CA this summer - and then Robbie got home and they returned to Philly - where I am right now!!  We go home tomorrow, and I will miss being with "the little girls" and their families!

Photos will be posted later - they are still on the camera - but I have been doing a lot of reading.  Somehow, even with lots going on, I manage to read a lot.  So here's a brief rundown - not really in chronological order - mostly in the order I remember them in!

Fin and Lady by someone whose name I can't remember at the moment was a sleeper.  Phoebe left it when she came - said she'd picked it up at Costco on a whim - and it was slow starting - so many books are, aren't they?  But the plot took a circuitous route to compelling - about a young boy who is orphaned and entrusted to the care of his 18 year old half-sister.  Their adventures through the 60's was familiar - the war, the protests, the music of Dylan and Baez - maybe that's what I loved about it?

Picked up a copy of Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood in the Little Free Library in Eliza's neighborhood.  It is a dystopian tale - I don't always enjoys those but this one was helped by the excellent prose you can always count on with Margaret Atwood.  There are two sequels - the same story told from different points of view - not sure if I want to go there or not.  If I do, I will let you know.  It is a little creepy, but solving the mystery keeps you reading.

Looked at my Kindle Library and discovered that another Margaret Atwood book, The Blind Assassin, was there.  Harry may have gotten it - or Hannah.  We have a number of members in our Kindle Library!  It was not dystopian, but there was a compelling mystery to solve - and it's not sovled until the very end.  Halfway through you are sure you have solved it - but then you get to the end and you start thinking that maybe you got it wrong - and you did!  I do enjoy the author's style and use of language - she is a wordsmith extraordinaire!

Hannah mentioned that the current YA field of fiction was producing lots of new works that made good summer reads - so I read Gayle Forman's If I Stay and Where She Went. They are meant to go together, but the first one is better - the second one is better left unread!  It's about a young woman who is seriously injured in an auto accident that kills the rest of her family - and she is able to be present and see how everyone is responding as she lies in a coma.  It is a good summer read - at least the first one is.

I need something to read on the plane ride home - have checked the Kindle library for some possibilities - briefly started The Unforgiven - in the 60's it was a great movie with Audrey Hepburn. Also got hold of another Jane Robert Woods novel - she wrote The Train to Estelline - and there's always the two or three others on there that I've started a few times - but never got into.  Sometimes the 3rd time's a charm!