April & May Reading Update

It's been awhile since I've written a book post. I read a whole ton of the In Death books by JD Robb for awhile there and I just couldn't write book reviews on those! Anyways, I decided to join up with Jennifer,Joanne, Marilyn, and Tanya for their Share Your Shelf link up. (Click on each name to go to their blog.) Today I'm sharing about the non-In Death books I read in April & May. I'm also not sharing about the books I read during the readathon I participated in in April. You can read mini reviews on those books here.

Okay, I loved this book. It's one of the best books about adoption I've ever read. In case you dpn't know, I am adopted, and to me, it felt like a book which finally told my story. Now, this book does not tell the story of every adoptee, and even my siblings would have very different stories, but to me, this book told one I can relate too. My adoption wasn't full of trauma -- it was full of love and joy and it still is. So, read this book. It's not trauma porn for adoption and I am here for it.

I saw the mini series of this years ago (when I was watching the entire DVD series of Friends and they mentioned in a director's cut that David Schwimmer was missing when Monica and Chandler got engaged because he was filming this series). I'm so glad I saw the mini series before I read the book (and I rarely say that), because the book made a lot more sense with that background. 

This was a re-read and I really enjoyed it. I really need to re-read the rest of the series now. My principal had been reading this series and we were discussing it and I just wanted to read it again! 

 

 I bought this book about Shakespeare & Company, the English bookstore in Paris, at Shakespeare & Company, the English bookstore in Paris! Hahaha! This book was okay, but not as amazing as I'd hoped it would be. It left me feeling slightly flat. This was my lunchtime reading at work and I wasn't ever that excited to pick it up which was disappointing.

 

 I read this book in one sitting and cried and cried. It isn't a very deep book but a love story about grief and finding love again. This would be an excellent beach read!

 

 The next few books are ones I had leftover from The Decades Reading Challenge I participated in last year. (You can learn about that challenge here.) This book was fun to read in that its main character kept travelling back to the 90s. It fell a little flat for me though as I've read other time travelling books which I've enjoyed much more (The Time Traveller's Wife for instance).

 

 This was another Decades Reading Challenge book. It takes place shortly after 9/11 and is about a Muslim teenager who wears a hijab and how her classmates treat her. I read this in one sitting while I was recovering from Covid. I think this book would be great for teens, or possibly young adults, but it felt a little young to me.

 

 I picked this book up because I was intrigued by the premise. I found it interesting to read about white power and how, even though it became a lot more prominent during Trump's presidency, it actually started becoming more of a factor right after Obama was elected. I had been unaware of that. I thought this book really interesting and not dry, like I thought it might be.

 

 This was another Decades Reading Challenge book and I loved the story of three women, their friendship, and the town they lived in. This book covered a lot, considering it didn't seem all that deep at first. I really liked how the story unfolded slowly, but not in a boring way, if that makes sense :)

 

This was my book club book for May. My grandparents escaped The Ukraine shortly before the events of this book took place. I found this book, told in two timelines, hard to read because the story in the "present" (where "present" equals late 90s/early 2000s) was not as engaging as the story in the past. The story taking place in 1929 was very hard to read because of what was happening and the "present" story felt a little... boring.

 

 Considering how much I enjoyed this book, it took me a very long time to read it. It was quite dense so I read it quite slowly. However, I would highly recommend this book, based on a real person, because it was so beautifully written. I was this close to rating this book five stars on Goodreads but I couldn't quite give it that. It was definitely a 4 1/2 star read for me though!

 

 I re-read this book and it was just as good as the first time I read it. I loved the puzzles through out and it was fun to remind myself what all happened in the first book after I'd read all the other ones.

 

 This was an interesting book that I read quickly. Sally Hepworth doesn't write scary novels but they are suspenseful and I want to know what happened. This one didn't end they way I thought it would (do they ever?!?!?) but I did like how it ended.

 

 A book about spring training in baseball?!!? Sign me up. But in reality, don't, because this is a book of short stories and I'm really not a fan of short stories. It doesn't really even have all that much to do with baseball as the stories are more about some of the characters surrounding a baseball team as opposed to what actually happens on the field. I was left disappointed by this book.

 

 This book was so good, and so unexpected. When I got to the end, I was like, "What just happened here?" I would highly recommend this book except for the fact that Brooks is a white author and I am hesitant when white people tell the stories of people of colour. Some of the things I want to discuss about this book have nothing to do with the book and everything to do with "who is telling the story?" (Think American Dirt and the premise of Yellowface.)

I loved this book which is odd because it's really a book about city planning! Hahaha! However, the author, who is a city planner, is writing about how to make cities "walkable" from a planning perspective. I found so many of the points he made interesting and he definitely turned some of my assumptions on their head. For instance, more highways do not help alleviate traffic congestion. Having separate paths for bikes doesn't help alleviate bike accidents. This was my lunchtime reading book and I couldn't wait for lunch each day to see what I would discover next. And when we were walking around Toronto this past weekend, I kept noticing how things were laid out in the city and relating them to what I'd read.

So those are sixteen books I read in April and May which weren't In Death books! I've already read two books in June so we'll see if I share a "midway through June" reading report or if I'll just wait until July and join in with this link up again. Over the next couple of days, I'm looking forward to reading the other posts in this link up and discovering more great books to read.

Happy Reading everyone!!!