My Reading Week

I wasn't planning on writing a post for today but then I realized I'd read six seven books this week, and it was going to be too hard to write about them in an Instagram post for my weekly #natashareadsonfridays. So here you go -- mini book reviews for the win :) (I had to update from "six" books to "seven" because I read another book last night. Ooops.)

Also, this post is dedicated to Allena because she is always nicely encouraging me to post short reviews of every book I read. I really appreciate that she and Emily do a book round up at the end of every month and I get so many good reading suggestions from them. So Allena (and all the rest of you readers out there), this post is for you! :)

JD Robb is my guilty pleasure read. JD Robb is the alias for Nora Roberts and, under this name she writes futuristic (starting around the mid 2050s) mysteries centered around a murder cop in New York City. One of the things I love about these books (and there are almost sixty of them), is the way the community around Eve grows. In some ways these books are formulaic and I need that once in a while. I'll be honest and tell you right now that each book contains a couple of steamy sex scenes and I skim those. But I've read through this series numerous times (in fact, I think it's time to start doing another re-read) and they are just really fun books.

I thought The Dinner List was interesting and I loved the backstory. The premise is that the main character shows up to her birthday dinner with her best friend and the five people (living or dead) that she would like to have dinner with are all there. I found the events of the actual dinner less engaging than the back story. I think this would be an interesting movie, but I found it a bit confusing as a book, since is started without a lot of preliminary introduction. I think I would have liked a little more lead up to the premise which would have helped me engage a bit more with the overall story.

I think this is another book I found through the December blog challenge Favourite Covers prompt. This was a fun YA book. I liked Abby's sense of style and the way she embraces being fat, even with a mother who has made a business out of healthy eating. Because the title is hard to see, it's called The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles).

I enjoyed this book so much, I reviewed it yesterday. Go here to read all about it.

I rarely HATE books but I would make an exception for this one. So sad :( I decided to start attending our neighbourhood book club and this was the book they chose for March. I have to say it was a daunting book to introduce this book club to me and I was really nervous about attending the meeting. If this was representative of the books they read, this was not the book club for me.

Thankfully, every single person at the meeting also hated this book. It's written from the point of view of a non-gendered narrator who has been working to finish their PhD thesis for a number of years. We get this narrator's view on three different relationships they have had. We all decided that potentially this book would be liked by the niche group of people who have written a humanities thesis. Other than that, it was too lofty for us. And there were some smart people attending this book club -- professors, librarians, etc.

Thank goodness the next book this book club is reading is A Man Called Ove so I'm going to stick it out.

After struggling my way through Theory, I needed a nice light read and this book fit the bill perfectly. I read it in one evening and it was a great palate cleanse. It's a lovely story following three people through the space of ten years and how their lives intersect with each other. I only cried for the last two pages so that was good!

I had to edit my post quickly this morning because I read this book last night. I picked it up, snuggled into bed, and the next thing I knew a couple of hours had passed and I had fifty pages left! It was a quick read but partly because it was so interesting. This story is about two sisters and how circumstances in their lives tear them apart and then bring them back together. It is a World War II story without having the war be a huge part of the book and it is set on an amory in Massachusetts. I think of all the books I read this week, this one was my favourite.

So that's what I've been reading this week. Have I inspired you to pick up any of these books and check them out yourselves? What are your light reads/guilty pleasure reads? I could always use some more reliable authors to read after books like Theory!