Like everyone else, I’ve found myself spending a lot more time at home and although I’ve partaken in zoom birthday parties, Netflix binging, etc., I’ve also tried to spend time away from screens, especially since all meetings now take place via a computer screen. I have by no means broke any records of books read, but I’ve read some good things from the Library’s Popular Reading Collection:
Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi. This book is the second in a planned trilogy, the sequel to Children of Blood and Bone. I was completely absorbed by the first book, so you can imagine how excited I was to read the next book. It was still absorbing but I found it slightly disappointing in that there was not much character development and the story didn’t seem to move forward, it repeated the same character issues and similar battles from the first book. Still, if you read and like the first book, it’s worth a read!
Time’s Convert: A Novel is a follow up to Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Series. If you read the series, this novel is set in the same world, with the same characters, plus a little backstory for a few of them. If you haven’t read the series, if you enjoy stories about witches and vampires living in our world, it’s worth a read.
The Babysitter’s Coven by Kate Williams was a delight to read. If you’re thinking Babysitter’s Club mixed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you are correct, and the narrator is not shy about it either. This is also planned to be a series, so you know I’m not-so-patiently waiting for the sequel to come out.
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo made me cry. It’s a novel told through a series of poetry. I like poetry, but I’ve always had a tough time sitting down to read poetry so a novel told through poetry was wonderful! The story is told from the point of view of a young girl in high school who has to learn how to navigate living in a world as a woman of color, daughter of super religious immigrant parents, and a poet.
There Will Come a Darkness: An Age of Darkness Novel by Katy Rose Pool is another delightful fantasy novel in our Popular Reading Collection. Although we have it in our collection, I consumed this book via audible while the library was closed. It was kind of difficult to listen to, a challenge I have in general because I prefer to read rather than listen, but because this book is set in its own world with quite a few characters, I missed out on being able to look at the map and being able to flip back to a character’s last chapter to remind myself what happened to them. Still, a great read, and yes another first in a series, so I will have quite a few books to follow up with in the future.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Hurston, Zora Neale is a short stories collection written during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Some stories are set in New York City, others are set in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston’s hometown. These stories depict the struggles of living and striving during the Harlem Renaissance.
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer made me nostalgic for my own college days, reading novels (for credit), living in a dorm with my best friends as roommates or living down the hall or just across campus, attending events to learn more about the injustices of the world and becoming a champion of women’s rights, climate change, racial injustices, etc. But that’s only the beginning of this book. I found this book to be quite long, a deep dive into a young woman’s experience of college, surviving a long distance relationship through college and beyond, early career woes, having to move back in with the parents post-college, all the way to following in the footsteps of her idol, despite a falling out during her first “real job.”
All of these blurbs are very much my own opinion and reflection upon reading these books. I found them all worth reading, even if none of them are my version of the “greatest book ever written.” I hope you find something worth exploring in our library, either from the Popular Reading Collection, or elsewhere.
