Monday Malarkey

I think I'm going to have to stop commenting on whether I'm having a good year or bad year. As soon as I say things are going well, it seems like either my reading skids to a halt or I get bogged down in a book I'm not sure I should finish. This week, I stopped reading one book and I'm loving what I started but finishing things? Not happening much.

Recent Arrivals:

• The Wholesome Cook by Martyna Angell is not technically mine; it's a book my husband brought home from his most recent business trip. But, I only had one arrival, this week, and The Wholesome Cook is so pretty that I asked if I could add his purchase to my photo. Because it's Australian, the measurements have to be adapted but Huzzybuns has already cooked some lemony chicken and a cashew-kale pesto that was great on crackers.
• Iris Grace by Arabella Carter-Johnson is a book I pre-ordered from Book Depository and I started reading it the evening it arrived. I've been following Iris Grace's adventures on Facebook since a friend posted a video about her paintings. Iris Grace is on the severe end of the autism spectrum and the book is the story of how art (and probably her cat, Thula, but Thula has not yet arrived by the point I've reached) opened up her world. So far, I'm loving this book. There's a little bit of "first-time author" awkwardness but it's negligible and I'm finding her story captivating.

Books finished since last Malarkey:

• In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 As Seen in the FSA Photographs by Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood - Mostly photographs but the introductory material to this book was much more interesting and revealing than anticipated.
• Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote - My F2F group's March selection and a book that definitely works for #Weirdathon. There's some major weirdness in that sucker.

Currently reading:

• Iris Grace by Arabella Carter-Johnson
• Lone Star by Paullina Simons - but this one may end up a DNF. Lone Star is 622 pages long and fairly word-dense but it reads a bit like a YA and I was expecting something . . . I don't know, with more of a literary feel? I stopped at p. 252 because the reading was going very slowly and I read In This Proud Land, that night. The next day, I didn't feel like picking Lone Star back up. And, the next day, and the next. It might be time to let this one go. 
• The Heart by Maylis De Kerangal - I've only read about a dozen pages so I don't know if this one's going to click, yet, but I do like the writing style and it's a translation (something I've been intending to read more) so we'll see how that goes. 
• Magazines - bunches of them. I subscribed to several magazines with unused airline points and they've been piling up like crazy so I'm trying to knock the stacks down and get some of those into the recycling. Husband also brought home some magazines from his trip and it's always fun to read articles from other countries so I read a bit of one, this weekend (a very interesting interview with Bindi Irwin). 

Last week's posts:

• A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown (review)
• Normal Norman by Tara Lazar and S. Britt (review)
• Getting Weird: Signed up for #Weirdathon (post about reading challenge)
• Fiona Friday: Twofers (cat photos)
• February Reads in Review, 2016 (brief descriptions of everything I read in February)

In other news:

I still haven't gotten around to pulling down the Margaret Atwood books (which require, believe it or not, either a tall ladder or a small scaffold to reach -- we do have one) so I'll just take a picture of the #Weirdathon books I already have in hand, tomorrow, if I haven't managed to get husband's help reaching the Atwoods. I have plenty of weird books within reach.

What's up in your world? Read anything marvelous?

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