I’ve decided that Fridays will be “Finish that post Friday” because I realize I have 78 posts in my drafts folder and I should really move some of them along. Although a few are incredibly dated and from 2020, so those might not see the light of day, except maybe as a curiosity…. Anyhow, I’m really late in my Books Read recaps, so that’s the first “Finish that post” that I’m going to write:
In mind-blowing book0sh discoveries I’ve made lately – Did you know you can export some of your information on Libby to a spreadsheet?
I am so excited about this! You can export your tags (so have a list of the books you want to read!), you can export reading data for a book, including all the highlights that you made (and then not have to copy them out again!) I love the idea of being able to see all that information instead of having to click around in the app to find it.
How to export tags:
- Tap Tags. or the little tag icon
- Select a tag.
- Tap Actions, then Export Tag.
- Choose an export format. You can select Spreadsheet to save it as an Excel sheet for offline access. It will generate a list of all the books in that tag.
How to export your highlights:
- Select the book you want.
- Tap on Actions
- Tap Export Reading Data
- Then choose export format. As with tags, I like to pick Spreadsheet, but you can also pick Table for a web based format. You will also get information about your reading journey, your highlights and bookmarks, etc.
I am so excited to learn about these Libby features!
Anyhow, on to books I read in September and October. I thought September was a good, but not great reading month. So many books that I enjoyed, but nothing that went to the top of my 2026 List. If I gave stars, I would say it was a solid 4 star month – a lot of books I would recommend, but none that I would re-read myself. I was surprised at how many books I finished in October given that I was back at work, but I think many of the books were on the shorter side.
September Books:
These Summer Storms by Sarah McLean– I’m a big fan of MacLean’s historical romances, so I was intrigued by her contemporary novel. I wouldn’t call it a romance, per se. While the romance is a major plot point, the novel is mostly about the Summer family and the aftermath of the death of their patriarch. As the details of the father’s will and the ensuing inheritance game unfolds, each member of the family has to come to terms with their past mistakes and current flaws. I thought this was a enjoyable read.
10 Rules for Raising a Kid in a High Tech World by Jean M. Twenge- The title pretty much says it all. I thought this book was a little alarmist. Yes, there is an infinite number of ways the internet/ social media is scary and dangerous and bad for people (not just teens), but also I do think the internet is a resource and can be used judiciously. There was one passage where Twenge says if your kid is the last of their friends to have a phone than you’ve won, and that kind of competitive mindset didn’t sit well with me. I think a phone is a tool and there are many reasons a kid at any age might need the tool. I have to say the “Wait until Eighth” campaign infuriates me a little because you can’t know why a family makes the decision to give a kid a phone. I think of my neighbor who gave their 2nd grader a phone because there were custody issues and he always wanted his kid to be able to reach him if needed. The last thing my neighbor needs is pressure from the other parents on the school listserv to doubt the choices he’s making.
All that said, though, I think there are interesting things to think about in this book and what is more important than the rules that Twenge sets out, are the conversations that she encourages parents to have with their kids.
Hello, Molly by Molly Shannon with Sean Wilsey, read by Molly Shannon – I’m not a big Saturday Night Live watcher, but I’ve always enjoyed watching Molly Shannon on screen- I always find her daffy and full of energy yet also down to earth. I thought this memoir would be funny. It’s not. She’s actually had some pretty sad things happen to her. Also, for a book published in 2022, she’s incredibly blasé about the sexual harassment and abuse that goes on in the entertainment industry, including things that she endured herself. That all just made me uncomfortable. I did find the inside look at how Saturday Night Live comes together fascinating, though.
Well Played by Jen de Luca – This is the second in a series of romance novels set against the backdrop of a Renaissance Festival. I love me a Renaissance Festival and I thought the first book (Well Met) in this series was pretty good. I didn’t like this one as well as the first book. While I liked the two main characters individually – I mean I always have a soft spot for a tech roadie – I didn’t feel much chemistry between the two of them. Also there’s some behavior on the main guy’s part that was seriously questionable.
Game of Rogues by Julie Anne Long – Latest in the Palace of Rogues series. I liked this one, but My Season of Scandal is still my favorite. This novel’s heroine is annoyingly naive in the beginning, but I grew to like her by the end of the book. As always, Long’s male main characters are sardonic, witty, and have hearts of gold hidden under layers of questionable choices.
This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay, read by Adam Kay – Memoir of Adam Kay’s time as a junior doctor, an OBGYN in England’s National Health Service. This book was grisly, graphic, hilarious, and also oh so human. Also I’m glad I’ve already had my kids because of Kay’s stories about the process of giving birth are alternatingly blasé and horrifying. I love niche occupational memoirs and this one was very entertaining.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Greene and David Levethan – This is a YA novel featuring two Chicago area high schoolers with the same name. They live very different lives and meet by chance, but then their lives are brought together by the larger than life Tiny Cooper, who is friends with one Will Grayson and is writing a musical. The chapters alternate between the two Will Graysons (technically Will Grayson and will grayson), with Greene writing one teen and Levethan writing the other. I’m a sucker for a book about high school musicals so this has been on my radar for a while. I don’t always have a lot of patience for coming of age/YA novels because a lot of them aren’t well written to me -they have good plots, but the prose is a little pedestrian. I thought this book was well written, hilarious, and teenage characters that made me cringe in a sympathtic way.
14 Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School by Michelle Icard – What I found the most useful about this book is the framework for talking to tweens/teens. Icard gives a five step approach to being curious but not judgmental when exploring topics such as screentime, healthy habits, friends, sex, money, fairness. The acronym is BRIEF – B(egin peacefully), R(elate – give empathy and understanding), I(nterview, ask neutrally for facts), E(cho – repeat to show you are listening), F(eedback – actionable steps). While she does give actual scripts for conversations, some of them I read and thought, “I can’t ever imagine myself saying that to my kid.” A good book to have in one’s parenting toolkit, I thought.
Trash! A Garbage Man’s Story by Simon Pare-Poupart, read by Jean Brassart – This was a short, spunky memoir written by Pare-Poupart, a Montreal sanitation worker. He recounts his back breaking experiences with irreverent and colourful anecdotes. I really enjoyed hearing about the citizens and colleagues he meets along the way – I think his words and Brassart’s narration really brought these people to life.
OCTOBER BOOKS – I hit 80 books for the year this month! I know that number of books isn’t a super important metric – I’d rather count the amount of time I spend reading – but it does feel rather fun that I got to 80.
Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang – This is a coming of age story of a Chinese- American college student who goes to Taipei for a summer language program. So much of this book felt very familiar – not just the sights and sounds of Taiwan, but also the feeling of knowing but not knowing a place, of feeling that a place is connected to you, but that you aren’t fully of that place, of connecting to parents but also not really knowing their past. As a reading experience that I could relate to, I really liked this book. As a novel itself – there isn’t much of a plot and people make a lot of dumb young people choices, and I just found a lot of the characters annoying. I thought that my 14 year old should read this book as she is interested in going to Taiwan to study Mandarin, but see above re: dumb young people choices.
I did make a lot of highlights in this book. This was my favorite, an exchange between the protagonist Lily and her Mandarin teacher:
“It is an extremely difficult grammatical structure! I have American students who can never get over this. I have students doing advanced research in Classical Chinese who still do not have an intuitive grasp of the resultative ending. But you don’t struggle with it at all. Do you know what that means?”
“That I will learn faster?”
“No!” Her voice shot up in pitch. “It means you are lazy. I know your type! Some things come easy to you, so you think everything will. But in fact you are more prone to making mistakes because you trust an inner ear that only works some of the time.”
The Chateau on Sunset by Natasha Lester – I picked this one up because it was billed as inspired by Jane Eyre and I’m a sucker for a Jane Eyre spin. This book tells the story of orphan Aria Jones who goes to live in the Chateau Marmont, a hotel populated by Hollywood stars past present and future. This is a book that is told in dual, converging timelines, which I found a little bit confusing because it was hard to tell what had happened in which story. All that said, I thought Aria was a great character and I did want to find out what happens to her throughout the book. It isn’t an exact parallel to Jane Eyre, but I think it has a lot of the spirit of resilience and re-invention that I love about Bronte’s novel. This was also a hard book to read because the shit at Cornell was going down when I read this book, and, like any book set in Hollywood, sexual assault and the casting couch is a big plot point. The cover is gorgeous, though.
Same Time Next Summer by Annabel Monaghan – continuing my Annabel Monaghan binge – I’m trying to read her books in the order written. One thing I really love about Monaghan is that she is very good at writing 1st person narrative that doesn’t seem one sided, I always feel like I get a sense of what the other person is going through emotionally even when the specifics are vague. This one is about Sam who goes back home for a few weeks during the summer with her fiance and meet Jack, her childhood sweetheart/ boy next door. The novel deals with why they grew apart and how they deal with the tension of living next door to each other all summer. This one seems to be the least liked of her books, and I can see why. I feel like the plot doesn’t hold together as well as the other Monaghan books I’ve read – Jack is almost too perfect and Sam is just kind of a mess and tramples over people. I guess this book was fine, but I didn’t love it.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib, read by the author – This book was part poetry, part memoir, part tribute to the sport of Basketball and a musing on how communities come together. I picked up this book because we are a big basketball family and I was interested in stories of community and basketball. I have to be honest, a lot of this book went over my head. Abdurraqib’s musings about being a basketball fan in Columbus, OH are far ranging and rambling; his language is beautiful and poetic. He talks about LeBron James a lot. I found myself sinking into the gorgeous rhythms of the words and not really grasping the meanings. Sometimes I felt like I wanted to read the print version of this book just so I could better piece his ideas together. The parts that stick with me is this idea of home and how basketball can feel like a home-coming and a place of comfort and familiarity and also of hope and possibility. One of my favorite quotes:
“There is a shortcut to glory that doesn’t run through northeast Ohio, but no one will love you like we love you. “
Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, Edited by John Bowe, Marissa Bowe, and Sabine Streeter – I had read this book when it first came out twenty years ago and I was inspired to read it again by Engie’s book reviews of some very niche job memoirs. I think this book is modelled after Studs Turkel’s book Working, where people talk about their very ordinary jobs. It’s funny there are some chapters I remember from twenty years ago – the one about the roadie really made an impact as did the one about the sales rep for the Adhesives company – and there were some that I loved reading this time that I didn’t remember at all from last time, like there was one by an Orthopedic surgeon that I just found fascinating. One thing that struck me is how people would often at the beginning of the interview say that they liked their job, but by the end, they would bring up all the negative stuff and say they didn’t want to stay forever. I loved all the every day wisdom to be found in this book, like this gem from a train engineer:
“You’ve got to be thinking in your mind where the rear of the train is at, and what’s going on in between. You know, gravity works one hundred percent of the time. It never fails.” So true, but also could be a metaphor for so many things in life.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayak Murata – read for Engie’s Cool Bloggers’ Book Club. What a quirky yet clear-eyed book. I still don’t think I love Japanese literature; I find it a little bloodless. But I did enjoy reading this book and seeing where it went and all the details about convenience stores.
Winter Stories by Ingvild H. Rishøi, translated by Diane Oatley – This is a collection of three short stories. I had read Rishøi’s Christmas story Brightly Shining and thought it was unsentimental but touching. I decided to ready this one too as we are nearing winter and I thought it would be nice to have a winter read. Spoiler alert – these stories are not cozy and heart-warming. They are sad and desperate, with crumbs of kindness thrown in just enough to make the stories even sadder. Recommended if you want something to make you truly feel the cold bleakness of winter.
Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino – I tore through this book in four days. This novel tells the story of Margo Miyake, a 37 year old PR professional with a very agreeable husband in Washington, DC who is obsessed with buying her dream house. Well, any house, given the market. She becomes obsessed with a specific house and then will stop at nothing to get it. I’m a sucker for books set in DC, and reading about places that are familiar to me. But I’m not really a thriller fan, and I thought Margo was bonkers and made some really poor life choices. So this was a page turner for sure, but ultimately I felt like I needed a shower and a cozy romance once I was done.
On my Proverbial bedside table:
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl – I need to finish this book because it is waaaay overdue at the library. This is my current non-fiction read.
A Widow’s Charm by Caitlin Paxton – just started this book, historical fantasy about a Lady who’s husband inconveniently dies. The book blurb says, “Witty, whimsical, and deeply kind” I kind of want all those things in my life right now.
The Wake-up Call by Beth O’Leary – another fun fluffy read.
Trashed by Derf Backderf – a graphic novel about garbage collection. Clearly I’m on a binge.