It's Monday, May 5! What Are You Reading?

Book By Book

Hosted by The Book Date

Life

Happy Cinco de Mayo! How on earth is it May already?? When you go away for a full month, it really makes the time speed by! And I went away again this weekend. Last night, I just returned home from Booktopia, my annual pilgrimage with my Mom to the fabulous Northshire Bookstore in beautiful Manchester, Vermont. Booktopia is a unique bookish weekend where authors and readers hang out together, talk books, eat meals together, and play book trivia! Every year–including this one–we hear the invited authors say in wonder, “This is unlike any other book event I have ever attended!” Part of that is the intimate, interactive environment between readers and authors, and part of it is the warmth and camaraderie of the attendees, many of whom–like my mom and I–return year after year. This was our 8th year attending. But newbies are always welcome, too, and soon have dozens of new friends!

Here’s a quick overview with photos of the weekend. There were about 80 attendees and 9 authors (plus a bonus author event on Sunday). Tomorrow, I will be editing my annual Booktopia Vlog, with video clips of the booksellers recommending books, the authors talking about their books and answering questions, the lovely town, the amazing bookstore, and much more. Check my YouTube channel tomorrow evening for that (and I will link it here on the blog next week).

The weekend begins Friday morning with “This Gift Card Is Burning a Hole in My Pocket.” Every attendee’s registration fee includes a $50 gift card for the bookstore, and the wonderful Northshire booksellers (many of them have been there for all 15 or so years of Booktopia!) each recommend 5-6 books they’ve loved. You can see a few of those recommendations here:

After a lunch break (there are lots of great restaurants and cafes nearby), the author sessions begin. This year used a slightly different format: one of the booksellers interviewing an author or two authors paired together because their books share some common thread. These sessions are very interactive, and if the book is already out, then many of the attendees have read it, so you get some really interesting discussions and Q&A’s. For the next day and a half, we each chose which author sessions we wanted to attend. There were 9 authors, so with the pairings, you could see all of them. Alas, I need an afternoon nap, but I still got to three sessions, each with two authors.

Here is Nicole, a co-owner of the bookstore, interviewing authors Shubha Sunder, Optional Practical Training, and Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon (links to mini reviews in past Monday posts of both books). I have been a fan of Jennifer’s (we’re on a first name basis now lol) novels since 2007, so I was really fangirl-ing to meet her and talk to her about her books!

Friday evening is a really fun gathering for cocktails, dinner, and book trivia! The booksellers and authors are at the tables with the readers/attendees, so it’s a chance to get to know them better. Here’s our table–the victorious winners of book trivia! One of our team has twin toddlers at home, and a bonus question was to name the 17 items in Goodnight Moon that they say goodnight to. She easily named 16 of them! Our team name was “We’re Gonna Dewey Decimate You,” and the guy in the center of the photo is author Stuart Nadler:

Midday on Saturday was an event with all nine of the authors, where they each have 10 minutes to read an excerpt of their book (or something else they wrote) or talk about whatever they want.

Finally, after more author sessions, there is an optional Yankee Book Swap. We were pretty wiped out by then, but we enjoyed a nice dinner out with some old friends and some new friends! The four other women at this table with my mom and I all live here in Delaware.

It was another outstanding Booktopia weekend! And after a long day of driving yesterday, I am in surprisingly good shape today. I can’t wait until next year!

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 Books and Art Tag – A Booktube friend in Italy created this tag to celebrate her 1st anniversary on Booktube. It’s a really fun one that pairs 8 famous paintings with prompts for books. I chose favorite books for each of the prompts and enjoyed doing it!

Friday Reads 5-2-25: Ready for Booktopia! - Hear more about some of the books I read for Booktopia.

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I finished reading Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn for Booktopia. It’s early 2020, and Rachel is going through a divorce … and a global pandemic. Living on her own for the first time in her life, isolated by the pandemic, and finally out from under her ex-husband’s overbearing nature, Rachel is trying to rediscover who she is. She adores her three children, who alternate their time between her new apartment and their old one, but when she’s alone, she’s exploring her newfound freedom. There is plenty of emotional depth to this novel, but Rachel’s awakening is also sexual, as she tries the dating apps, has a wide range of sex with a wide range of people, and uses her coding skills to create a “perfect person” app. This novel is not everyone’s cup of tea–some find it too graphic–but I really enjoyed it and was rooting for Rachel to heal, find herself, and explore her newfound independence. It’s also a very thoughtful exploration of pandemic life. 

Now I am reading Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler (the author who sat at our table for dinner at Booktopia). I’m not even 100 pages into it yet (not much reading time this weekend, ironically!). It’s an unusual look at a Jewish family, the Aldermans, in Vienna that was separated by WWII. Supposedly, they were each killed during the war, but the novel is an alternate history of what happened to each of them. Daughter Sonja is grown up and living in London, where she was evacuated to during the war as a child, with her conductor husband, who’s just gone missing. Mom Fania is living in Montreal, talking with another survivor, after fruitlessly searching for her family after the war. Moses, who was just six months old when he was torn from his mother’s arms, is an adult now, followed by the ghost of his best friend. And Arnold, the father, has a sudden hope that his daughter may have survived after he receives a call from an Englishwoman. It’s a bit confusing because you’re not sure what’s real and what’s imagined or in this alternate world. I read one review where the reviewer flat out stated that they all died, and this was just an imagining, but the official description of the book leaves it more open than that: “A prismatic mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds.” It’s very well-written, and I’m enjoying it so far.

I finished listening to The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez, another Booktopia selection (the special Sunday guest) and a very unusual novel. Alma is a successful novelist living in Vermont, but she has many, many stories that she tried to write but just couldn’t finish … yet those stories and characters haunt her. When she moves back to the Dominican Republic and inherits a small plot of land there, Alma–with the help of a local artist–turns it into a cemetery for her unfinished stories and buries her old manuscripts. But the stories and characters refuse to die. They begin to talk back to her and to Filomena, a local woman hired as a groundskeeper and even to each other. I sometimes struggle with magical realism, but I really enjoyed this novel, especially on audio. I loved the way the different characters’ stories gradually came together.

On the way home yesterday, I binged a solid three hours of Sandwich by Catherine Newman, which I’ve been skipping on Libby for months now every time my name came up! I’m so glad I finally have the chance to listen to it. Rachel, who everyone calls Rocky, is a middle-aged mom of adult children going through a very difficult menopause. She and her husband, Nick, and their two twenty-something kids (plus one girlfriend) are at the cottage on Cape Cod that they have rented every summer for 20 years. Rocky’s aging parents join them for the last few days. It’s set in Sandwich, Mass, and is about the “sandwich generation,” which I can definitely relate to! Rocky is dealing with her own hormonal struggles, enjoying the company of her adult children, concerned about her marriage, and worried about her parents. Often, something in the present in this very familiar place sends her reminiscing back to the many summer vacations they’ve spent here, so you gradually learn the family’s history. I’m enjoying it so far, and listening for such a bug chunk of time really immersed me in the story and the narrator. 

My husband, Ken, is reading another Robert Crais novel that we picked up in a used bookstore on our road trip, Suspect. He’s enjoying getting reacquainted with this author.

 Our son, 30, is still rereading the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks, an old favorite of his, in preparation for the latest book (Beyond the Shadows). So, he’s rereading book 1, The Way of Shadows, and book 2, The Shadow’s Way. He was home again this weekend, with his girlfriend, so I was sorry to miss them.

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 What are you and your family reading this week?