My son and I finished Hilo 5 last night. It was SOOOO good. Judd Winick said that the next book will be the final installment of the current story line. I can’t wait to find out how it ends, and it’s going to be sooooo long until it comes out. Waiting is not easy!
Luckily there are LOTS of other books I want to read in the meantime.
I’m currently listening to So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. I borrowed the audiobook from the library (it finally came available!), but this is definitely a book we should own (and you should too!). I’ll be buying us a copy soon.
Ditto with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. I was half way through this audiobook when Oluo’s book became available, but I definitely want to finish it AND own my own copy.
I was actually in the middle of listening to La Amiga Estupenda (the Spanish edition of Elena Ferrante’s My Brillant Friend, which was originally written in Italian) when both of the above books became available on my library e-service apps. I wasn’t loving it, so I didn’t mind taking a break, and now I’m listening to it once every 3-4 commutes. It’s okay, but there are so many characters in so many families and when they just use first names I can’t keep them all straight.
I also started the e-book of Ayelet Waldman’s A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Big Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life before all these other books became available and I definitely want to finish it. My hope was I would read it on my phone instead of scrolling through my news app and reading upsetting articles all night long. Sadly that habit has been harder to break than I expected.
I’m also reading the YA novel La niña que bebió la luna (the Spanish version of The Girl Who Drank the Moon) by Katherine Barnhill. It is really, really good and I have a hard time putting it down. I’ve been putting aside entire hours to read it at night; it’s definitely the reason I’ve been getting so little sleep this week.
I also have Contar de 7 en 7 (the Spanish edition of Holly Goldberg Sloan’s YA novel Counting by 7s) out from the library and hope to get that done before it’s due.
Another YA novel I want to read The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. Somehow I cannot find this in Spanish (even though it’s protagonist is an Afro-Latina girl living in a Dominican dominated Harlem neighborhood AND has been translated into Portuguese already!) so I’ll probably wait on it with the hopes to read it in Spanish. I really like to read YA novels in Spanish (and so many of them are translated!), but this one especially would be awesome to read in Spanish. I’ll definitely be buying the English version for my classroom.
Other books I have on my long-term list are Empires of the World: A Language History of the World (recommend by Josh Marshall and very interesting to me as someone who majored in linguistics), The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny (I read Ordeal by Hunger in middle school – and spent years staying in cabins around Donner Lake outside of Truckee where you can see the trees cut down during their months long ordeal there – and have been intrigued by the Donner Party ever since), and Time to Parent (which landed on my radar after a post by Mel).
In the comic book world I have five single issues of Paper Girls sitting by my bed and three volumes of Saga in Spanish that I still haven’t read.
So yeah, there are a lot of books out there I want to read, and not enough to read them all. And more will continue to interest me and end up on my lists.
Remember that episode of The Twilight Zone? Time Enough at Last? Man, that one always killed me. At least I’m not that guy, and maybe some day there really will be time enough at last.
What are you looking forward to reading?
Oluo and Coates both interesting and informative. “New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander fits in with reading those. I liked Michelle O’s memoir also.
“Women Rowing North” is on my library list but not yet in my hands. People seem to either love Ferrante’s work or just don’t get into it… i am in later group though I still vividly remember many of the scenes she writes about so have always been startled that I didn’t become devoted to reading them all.
Yeah, I’m definitely in the latter group as well, as far as Ferrante goes. My mom read all of the “friend” series with her book club and seemed to like it. I feel like I’m trudging through the first book in the series, but I want to finish it so I can watch the HBO series. 😉 I definitely want to read Michelle Obama’s memoir, and am waiting for my mom to loan me her copy, but I’m also not in a huge hurry to read it, I’m not sure why. I will definitely look into “New Jim Crow”. Thanks!
The first book is a bit of a slog. I didn’t really love it until the last chapter, after which I was very excited to keep on reading and then went on and devoured the rest of the series. The second book was my favorite. But I had a hard time getting through the first and only did it because people swore they get better — and they do!
I really did NOT like the first Ferrante book (and never read the others). It was so boring! The minutia of day to day is sometimes fascinating to me, but maybe something was lost in translation because I could NOT understand why people love this series. LOVED Coates, and the Girl Who Drank the Moon! I need to read the Uluo also, adding to my list now.