For a woman who started a book blog, I have been in a reading slump! Last year, I read 100 books and even permanently declared my love of reading with a little book stack tattoo.
As of May 2019, I've read 15 books this year. April showers brought... well, five new reads to my 2019 bookshelf. I finally found the perfect reads to get me out of my reading slump and get me moving along on my goal of reading at least 50 books in 2019.
April's featured local author: Tiffany McDaniel
Set in small town Ohio, a family and a town spend a summer with the devil and learn lots about love, hate, and faith along the way.
The Summer That Melted Everything is a heartbreaking account of what it looks like when co-habitating with evil.
“A snake that could harm you, you don’t have much choice to kill. You wouldn’t be able to leave a cobra in your sock drawer. But snake that is no threat will greatly define the man who decides to kill it anyways.” ― Tiffany McDaniel, The Summer that Melted Everything
Spanning decades, states, and siblings - the Skinner family's poetic and complicated existence is explored in The Last Romantics.
The book explores the stories that teach us about ourselves, our our family, and the bonds that sustain us throughout a lifetime.
“It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.” ― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics
I read this entire book in less than two hours. It was just that good.
Keeping this summary really short because, well, the title tells you the gist of what you need to know! The writing is impeccable, clever, and dark in all the right ways.
A novel showcasing just how much thicker blood is than water and the undeniable love and protection granted by sisters.
“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer
Nora is in love with two men at the same time... and she doesn't even try and hide it.
No Happy Endings explores love and life in a way I've never read before. In an honest, funny, sad, and witty read - Nora McInerny writes of the love she had (and continues to have) for her first husband, Aaron, while building a family with her current husband, Matthew.
“You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.” ― Nora McInerny, No Happy Endings: A Memoir
Ever had one of those days that left you thinking "wow, I need a nap... a nap that lasts a million years." Yep, same - a few of them actually.
In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, our narrator does just that. She sleeps. For a year. On a mix of too many drugs to even keep straight, prescribed by one of literature's worst (yet maybe most entertaining) psychiatrists to date, our narrator lives a year in a drug-induced state of hibernation. The book is tender, funny, privileged, and relatable. With an unnamed narrator, the reader is almost able to picture anyone they know (maybe even themselves) on the couch of the New York apartment written of in the book.
“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.” ― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
All pictures in this post are from my Instagram - want to catch what I'm reading before my monthly round ups go live? Follow me!