China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan

These are the two sequels to Crazy Rich Asians, and I liked them less than the original. The swearing really started to bug me by the end, and I felt like the author just kept trying to come up with more and more wild displays of wealth to shock the reader without adding much to the plot. I liked Astrid's plot throughout these books of the trilogy, but I was disappointed that Nick and Rachel weren't as involved. I don't know if I would read another one after these; I felt done with them.

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

I watched this movie on our plane flight out to London last summer, and LOVED it. So I've been meaning to read this trilogy forever. I really liked the storyline as it followed the movie, except it seemed like the f-word was on every page of this book. Three times each page. It was definitely a fun story though.

Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner

This book was totally different than what I expected from the cover and the blurb that I read about it. It looks like it's going to be a cutesy quick-read romance chick-lit novel, and it starts out like that, with lots of talk about Instagramming and influencing and Daphne's life as a plus-size influencer. But then it takes a sharp turn and becomes a murder mystery, which is so much fun. I have to say that I definitely suspected who the murderer was--I just knew something had to be up there. And I was a little not impressed with her romance, but I enjoyed this book just the same. I thought the premise and the writing were both great. 

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

I did not love this book like I did the Hunger Games when I first read those books. This book is the prequel to that series, about President Coriolanus Snow when he was a teenager, so it provides some interesting backstory to the Hunger Games, but it was missing the fun romance and any sort of likable and relatable characters that you get in the original trilogy. I really disliked Coriolanus, felt no interest in his romance, and I felt like the ending was weird. I had to force myself to finish it, honestly. 

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

This was a great book to listen to with so much information that was really useful in this civil rights movement right now. I felt like DiAngelo did a good job of describing white privilege and white fragility in a way that most white people would be able to recognize and respond to appropriately. It was definitely worth the listen.

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Everything Rainbow Rowell has written is good. After listening to Landline a few months ago, I got on a kick where I really wanted to read Attachments, but our library didn't even have an e-book copy of it (and definitely not an audiobook copy, which is what I really wanted), so I kept putting it off. But I've had lots of time to read while nursing lately, so I've been blazing through books like nobody's business, so I'm trying to check off some books that I've always been meaning to read off my list. I absolutely loved 99% of this one, about Lincoln, a tech guy who is hired in 1999 at a company to read any suspicious employee emails and make sure no one is sharing anything wrong in their work emails. He begins to fall in love with a woman who is always emailing with her friend while they share their life stories with each other, even though he's never met her and she doesn't know he exists. This book was fantastic 95% of the way through, until the very end where they finally meet, and I was super confused by the way they met each other and why it had to happen that way... But I loved the romance and the build-up and how we got to know the two women who were emailing back and forth to each other gradually, just like Lincoln did. Rowell has such a great voice and does such a good job of writing excellent dialogue.

Textbook by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

I've loved everything Amy Krouse Rosenthal has done, although I've only read many of her children's books. But every single one of her children's books are cute and fun and worth the read. (Her Little Pea is possibly one of the best children's books ever. Period.) I have meant to read this memoir-ish book of hers for years, and finally checked it out from the library a few weeks ago. It ended up only taking about an hour to read, because each page has only a few words on it. There are some stories she's written about her life and family, then there are just some observations, all randomly placed throughout the book, and there are even interactive sections where she gives you a number you can text to respond to what she's said. I thought it was really cute and fun to read, but also so poignant knowing that she has passed away. I think she must have known she was dying while she was writing this book, because there are several parts where she writes about how beautiful this world is and how she doesn't want to say good-bye, and it honestly made me tear up knowing that she is now gone. I really like her and I loved reading this.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

I've checked this book out from the library at least four times and never got around to reading it. I checked it out as a hard copy, as an e-book, and as an audiobook. And it never caught my fancy enough for me to want to read it... until I finally heard so many great reviews of it that I went ahead and listened to it (because Tom Hanks was the narrator, which made it just that much more appealing). And it was great. It was totally worth it. It is the story of a family growing up in this house, and spans maybe five decades from when the main character is a child, until he is a middle-aged man. You see his family together, then falling apart, then falling apart even more, and then slowly being found in different ways again. It's the story of a family, and their house, and the house is almost a character, a member of their family, and it represents everything the son and daughter have loved and lost and found. I thought this book was fantastic (I should have known, I've always loved what Ann Patchett does), and I'm glad to have finally read it.

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

I listened to this audiobook, which I don't remember putting onto my "to-read" list for any specific reason. It ended up being relatively interesting, about our memories, how we remember things, and especially about the competitive memory circuit and how people are able to memorize an entire deck of cards in under thirty seconds or to remember hundreds of random digits in order. I thought it was interesting that they used the idea of the "memory palace," imagining things being in a specific location in your brain where you can go back and pick it up whenever you want to recover it. This memory palace idea is one that we'd just seen while watching several episodes of the BBC's Sherlock, so I thought it was super interesting to see how that actually works in real life, and to learn how it was a process developed in antiquity and is still used by memory champions today. I don't think I would ever be interested in using those techniques--they were super weird and funny, and I can't see how they would help me in my everyday life--but it was fascinating to learn about.

The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson

This is the final book in the Truly Devious series, and it was worth the wait I had to go through at the library to read it. The book finishes Stevie's investigation into the Ellingham murders, and it was incredibly satisfying to find out what happened to everyone and how it all worked. My only complaints remain the same as the last book--I still really don't like Stevie's love interest, and I still really don't like the use of "they" for a genderless person--but this book did a great job wrapping up all of the many loose ends of the mystery. (I honestly read this two weeks ago at this point, so I can't write any more specifically about what I remember about it, but it was definitely a good read.)

Beach Read by Emily Henry

I thought this book was fantastic. It came highly recommended on Modern Mrs. Darcy's Summer Reading Guide, and when I finally was able to get it from the library, I breezed through it in less than a day. It was such a fun read about a girl who writes romance novels but who has lost her faith in happy ever afters and is stuck, unable to write any more of her genre. She moves to a beach house on Lake Michigan and is dismayed to find out her next-door neighbor is her old college writing rival, who has become a literary fiction darling and who is also stuck with his own writing as well. They make a bet to swap genres and to see if they can write something the other one would be able to write. And they--spoiler! (or maybe not so much, it's pretty obvious)--also fall in love. The romance scenes here were a little open-door for me. But I liked the insights into how the writing process worked for these two authors, and I did love both of the characters and their romance and how they became interested in each other. This was definitely a fun read, and not as fluffy as it looks (although it was mostly a romance).

Lovely War by Julie Berry

This book was set not in WWII, like every historical fiction novel ever these days, but during WWI. It had an interesting frame story with Aphrodite and Ares explaining why love and war are always drawn to each other, which helped to set off the actual novel, which was the romance of two separate couples who met and fell and love during the war, despite the trauma, injuries, and misfortunes they all met with. I really liked all of the main characters: Hazel and James, and Aubrey and Collette. They were all cute and fun to read, if maybe a little too sappy and desperately in love to be 100% relatable to logical old me. I thought the storyline of Aubrey, the Black Harlem jazz musician serving in Europe during the war, and all the details about what it was like serving as a Black serviceman during WWI and about jazz and ragtime music at that time, was fantastic. I was maybe a little skeptical that he would have been treated as well as he was in Europe at this time--although maybe it's true that they weren't as racist there as they were in America at this time--and that his relationship with a white woman would have been okay. I was also not altogether sold on the frame story with Aphrodite and Ares. The dialogue there was really pretty awkward and it never really reached its full potential for me. But it was altogether a beautiful book, and I was so happy when the two couples got the happy endings they deserved.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tommy and I have recently watched all of the LOTR and the Hobbit movies, and it made me want to re-read the books. I don't know if I'm going to get to the three LOTR books, because that's a bigger commitment and I have so many other books I'm trying to get through right now... but The Hobbit was right up my alley for now. I loved this book when I was younger, and still enjoyed it a lot for now, although it had been long enough since I read it that I couldn't remember most of the specific plot points from the book. I was surprised by how much in the movies sticks to the plot from the book--obviously they added way too much to make it stretch out into three different movies, but almost all of the adventures the hobbit and the dwarves get into are from the book. This is such a classic and is always worth a re-read.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

I've heard about this book for a year or so and kept meaning to get to it--and finally did with all this extra time for reading that I have while nursing. This is a crazy time-traveling murder mystery, where the narrator has to re-live the same day eight times in a row to solve a murder--from the different perspectives of eight different witnesses to the murder. He literally wakes up in a different body each day and has to use their perspectives to gain more clues to the murder. The story was totally unique and the mystery got more and more interesting as the book went on. But I felt like I was confused the whole time, and I didn't like that about this book. It makes sense, because the narrator is confused and doesn't understand, and doesn't have any information about what's going on either--but I felt totally lost and never really understood the implications of all of the clues the narrator kept gathering. I just didn't like the total confusion about it, even though the story itself was great and I'm very impressed by how he was able to keep it all straight and write this whole book without getting lost himself.

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

We are continuing to read through the Little House books. I've been waiting to get to this one to read with them, because it's such a crazy story that I remember vividly from reading them when I was a kid. It's so impressive to see how they survived and what they did to make it through the seven months' worth of blizzards. The boys were both really engaged and begged me to keep reading indefinitely every time we started.

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

This is one that was on Modern Mrs. Darcy's summer reading guide, and it was available as an audiobook from the library when I was looking for an audiobook to listen to while nursing. I didn't know anything about it, really, and the book cover didn't look all that appealing... but I had nothing else to listen to. And I really liked it. This book was about Casey, a struggling writer who is recovering from the shock of her mother's sudden death and being dumped from this whirlwind romance, and dealing with thousands of student loans while working as a waitress. The book is partly about her falling in love with two different men, but then mostly about how she deals with her anxiety and the pressures of writing. There's some kind of behind-the-scenes looks at what it's like to write and to get a book published, from sending your book to an agent and then to editors. The plot doesn't sound all that exciting, but what is really engaging about this book is how real it felt--Casey felt like a real person, and her struggles felt very real as well. The writing was very physical and relatable and believable. I've never read anything by Lily King before, but I would be interested in reading more because this was so well-done.

The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary

This was a super cute, quick and fun romance, with just a little bit more substance to it. I loved this story, about Tiffy and Leon, who share a flat, but just at different times, so they never actually are there at the same time and have never met. They get to know each other just by leaving notes for each other, and those notes get more and more friendly and personal. I liked how this book used both of them as narrators, alternating between both of their perspectives and helping us to get to know both of them. And I liked how Tiffy was dealing with an emotionally abusive ex-relationship, which she didn't really understand at the beginning of the novel. I liked how Tiffy began to see what she had gone through and to uncover the trauma of her relationship one layer at a time, slowly, as she got to know Leon. I thought it was so believable and it made their relationship much more meaningful as she tried to recover from what she went through. And the romance itself was really sweet and adorable, and Tiffy's friends were great characters to follow along with. All in all, a very fun listen.