So Many Books, So Little Time

We just got back from a brutal trip to Mayo. Brutal because we crammed it into a very short pocket of time and because I am still struggling with getting over something (three doctors and two nurse practitioners have now all weighed in on it). Because of schedules and illness, I wanted to get up and back in the shortest time possible. We did, we both survived, and there truly is no place like home.

While I total up the dollars this trip cost us (more than usual because we had an extra hotel stay in there rather than staying with family as I did not want to run the risk of getting anyone else sick), I thought I would bring my book reading for 2018 up to date. Here's the latest additions to the done pile:
70. Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern (a fun light read about three unsettled lives intersecting at a small New Hampshire library one summer)
71. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (a reread of Hemingway's memoirs of being a young expatriate/struggling author in 1920s Paris; this was the original text and not the revised edition brought out by his grandson in 2009)
72. Matchless: An Illumination of Hans Christian Andersen's Classic "The Little Match Girl" by Gregory Maguire (a reread of Maguire's heartrending tale of what happened after the Andersen story ends)
73. Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis (a reread of my very favorite Lewis novel and one that is rarely mentioned in this day and age; there is no more American American than Samuel Dodsworth and no more shallow and callous partner than his wife Fran)
74. Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (a quirky, unusual novel with intricate philosophical and literary references threaded through; I almost sanchezed it but stuck with it to the end)
75. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 by Edward L. Ayers (this is the prequel to a Civil War history I read earlier this year (#7); it was every bit as mesmerizing and I wish I had read the two books in chronological order)
76. The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea (family ties, family secrets, family loyalties, all wrapped around the dying and death of Big Angel, the family patriarch; what a gorgeous novel)
77. Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznok (a novelization in the first person voice of the life and death of Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokzhad, a feminist whose work was controversial under the Shah and was banned for many years after the Islamic Revolution)

And that is all for now.