Only a month to go before my favorite season begins!  This summer has flown by, and while I haven’t been a fan of the unusually extreme heat, I have been enjoying the wonderful fresh local produce…the past few days have been spent making strawberry jam and vacuum-sealing peaches and plums bound for the freezer.  Nothing beats the winter blues like tasting a bit of summer!

Even with the more hectic pace around here over the past week, I was able to sneak in some quality reading time.

The Week in Books

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig — 4 out of 5 stars

This was a wonderful surprise!  Who among us hasn’t wondered what our lives would have been like if we had made different choices?  Stuck in a limbo of sorts after a suicide attempt, Nora gets to experience those alternate lives, learning about herself and the meaning of true happiness.  A lot of times, books like this tend to get too syrupy sweet for my tastes, but Matt Haig does a great job of creating a story that tugs the emotional strings without being melodramatic or overly cutesy.

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey — 3 out of 5 stars

I’m a longtime fan of Matthew McConaughey so I was excited to find his new book available at the local library.  However, this mix of memoir and armchair philosopher just didn’t hit the mark for me.  The memoir aspect was a decent 3.5/4 stars (side note: if you’re looking for any kiss and tell kind of stuff, the best you’re going to get is some talk about three wet dreams, and I’ll just leave it at that), but all the philosophical side notes on every fucking page??  Let me put it this way:  by the half-way mark I quit reading them.  When I did go back to peruse some of the missed ones, all I could see were drunken/drug-induced ramblings that either didn’t make sense or completely contradicted each other.  Recommended for super fans, not sure about the rest of us.

California by Edan Lepucki  — 2 out of 5 stars

My July TBR selection that I finally finished!  I’m all for a post-apocalyptic themed novel where people are looking to survive the new reality and no zombies or other radiation-spawned creatures are involved.  But this one?  Yeah, not so much.  The main characters are beyond blah, and the whole (pretty extended) side note of cherishing a turkey baster as the last big splurge of  normal life grew old by the second sentence.  Oh, and let’s not forget that when they finally reach the Pines, it sounds a helluva lot like Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines.  And since Crouch’s Pines was published two years prior to this one?  Well, just saying.

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Stay safe and Happy Reading!