So I am back at my computer, finally with a quiet moment without a baby on my lap, to add a few tweaks to my blog and to catch you all up on what I’ve been reading since my last post. That is one of the nice things about maternity leave – lots of time to either sit and listen to a book, or read it on an e-reader. (No physical books for me at the moment, sadly. I don’t have enough hands.)
That being said, while I started A Promised Land by Barack Obama before my child was born, I did not finish it until after. And while I’ve really liked and appreciated the book (and I’ve technically read it five times over now) I also have no idea what order most of the sections go in. Baby really likes to fall asleep listening to Barack Obama’s voice on audio book. I’ll take it. It just means that because the book’s on loop, I’ve got the order a little confuzzled. Obama does do a very good job of laying out his reasoning and the history of the topics that he needed to know while he was in office. And honestly, I said it before my child was born, but reading A Promised Land felt like watching The West Wing, just with actual events instead of a fictional presidency.
I also read a couple of books for our “Armchair Detective Society” book club. Of those two, The Rose Code by Kate Quinn was my top choice. While the other book, The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin, was very readable and good, it didn’t have the complexities and draw that Kate Quinn imbeds in her work. On it’s own, The Last Bookshop in London is a wonderful read – and a very easy read if you want to hop into World War II London for a few hours.
The Rose Code, however, was a wonderful read – one that enabled me to get fully lost in the plot. (And the narrator was good, too: Yet another voice that baby would sleep to when I put the audio book on!) The Rose Code brings you into the depths and complexities of Bletchley Park – the world of the World War II code breakers. It reviews the Enigma machines, and even has a few run ins with real Bletchley Park characters, such as Alan Turing. It follows three women, going back and forth between their post-war lives and what they did in their “BP” days, with the mystery of a Russian spy thrown in the mix. Definitely a top choice read.
While physical books have been harder to read, it hasn’t stopped me from accumulating them. As I have not done a Book of the Month Club post since last November, here are the books I have picked for the last few months since then. Some of them I still have not hand a chance to fully leap into, but I am looking forward to every one of them.
Book of the Month choices since November:
- December 2020: In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren
- Add-On: Beach Read by Emily Henry*
- January 2021: The Dating Plan by Sara Desai* and Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
- February 2021: The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson and Send for Me by Lauren Fox
- March 2021: The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner
- April 2021: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
- May 2021: How Lucky by Will Leitch
- Add-On: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson*
- June 2021: Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian
*= Book I highly recommend. More coming soon.