Monday Reading Check In

Thank you to Putnam Books for the free/gifted book.

Hello book friends and happy Monday and happy March! The weekend involved a good amount of lazing around with a book or an audiobook on the go to wrap up February and kick off some March reading.

This week’s Monday post (and likely the rest of the week) is being fueled by an extra tall cup of coffee! Thursday evening my parents’ dog comes to stay with me for a couple week, so my days of quiet and peaceful reading (not to mention peaceful sleeping) are likely behind me for a while!

Over the weekend I picked up AMERICAN SHERLOCK: MURDER, FORENSICS AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN CSI by Kate Winkler Dawson. I am hoping to get in more nonfiction reading this year, so I was excited to get a copy of this one. This book follows the career of Edward Oscar Heinrich, a self started who was known as the American Sherlock Holmes. The book begins with a true crime case which very much caught my attention and then jumps back a bit to follow the rather winding route Heinrich followed to wind up in a forensics career. I find investigations fascinating and I’m looking forward to learning more as I continue reading!

In addition to this one, I have made a good start on a few more titles on my March TBR:

UNDER THE DOME by Stephen King is the King Buddy Reads book for March and it is a reread for me. It is a 1000 plus page beast and 35 hours on audio so I wanted to get a head start on this one, but it really is flying by (I am at about 50% I think after the weekend of working on crafts projects and housework while I listened). In this one, a barrier suddenly comes down around and over a small town, cutting them off from the outside world. The book begins with the catastrophic results of the dome coming down, from crashes to people and things cut apart. The sleepy little town quickly becomes less sleepy and of course the scariest enemy is other people!

ARE WE NEARLY THERE YET? by Lucy Vine is a more light-hearted read to balance out my heavier ones. Alice has just turned thirty and her birthday winds up a bit of a disaster. Now she’s cutting ties and taking off for adventure, starting off with a trip to LA while documenting her journey on a new blog. This one is told through a series of Alice’s blog posts, complete with reader comments, interspersed between the third person narrative of what is really going on (which often doesn’t exactly match how Alice presents herself). This one has given me some good laughs so far!

SCYTHE by Neal Shusterman is a book that has been on my shelf for a while and I finally picked it up for a reading challenge prompt. I was excited to learn that there is a buddy read going on for it this month on Instagram. Though I’ve taken on a LOT of buddy reads this month, it was good to find a group to chat with on a book I was planning to read anyway. I got started on the first hundred pages or so over the weekend and so far I’m really enjoying it. This is a world where death has been conquered, but to control population growth scythes must randomly select people to die. We’re following two scythe apprentices as they learn the trade. Of course when dealing with a utopian setting, things aren’t all perfect.

Along with these, I am still working on (and enjoying) ELANTRIS by Brandon Sanderson for the #Cosmerealong and this one will continue on through most of March.

How was your weekend? What are you reading this week? I’d love to hear!