It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Last week I finished Searching for Sunday and The Little Paris Bookshop. I enjoyed reading about the adventures of the "literary apothecary" in The Little Paris Bookshop, and I found the idea of a bookshop on a barge interesting and unique, but the book became, at times, overly sentimental, and seemed about 50-100 pages too long. The last 50-100 pages became so overly sentimental that I found the book difficult to finish.

This week I've stared a new novel, Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff, which was a finalist for the National Book Award this year. I'm not even 50 pages into the book, but so far I'm finding the book extremely well-written, and the author has a unique, almost staccato voice that's caught my interest. Here's a paragraph, to demonstrate: "He closed his eyes. He would walk bravely toward the end. He took one step, another. Loving the swishy feel of the carpet, the giddy blankness before him, he took three joyous running steps" (28). No wasted words here, and the book is full of unusual descriptions.

Another book I've started this week is The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, by Dan Barber. So far I'm finding that Barber has a talent for interspersing facts with personal details and description in a way that makes even his discussions of soil composition and wheat farming quite interesting.

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