How was your month in books? If you could use only one word or a phrase to describe June – what would it be? For me, it would be “Welcome back beeyachhh!”


TANYA PATRICE

Another month in the books! I’ve struggled with reading over the past 2-3 months – just not in the mood to read – but finally towards the end of June … my reading mojo came back! Thanks to Kim’s idea to write about Books to Read for (C)aribbean Heritage Month #ReadCaribbean I chose to listen to the audiobook of Augusttown, Kei Miller – and hearing the accented narration by Dona Croll made me feel connected to my home country. The book takes a hard look at the prejudices in Jamaica – against class and skin color, but it also brings forth the rich history of our people.

Augustown

Then, I was feening more Caribbean literature, so I picked up my first short story collection in years! –Everything Inside, Edwidge Danicat. Y’all – I can totally see why this book won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Every story in the collection gave me the feels. The main characters or setting are all related to the Caribbean and Danicat herself is from Haiti.

After that – well, on my 2020 New Releases on Our Radar was another collection of short stories – If It Bleeds, Stephen King. There are 4 stories in it – 3 novellas and a short novel featuring Holly Gibney from the Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider. Here’s a video of Stephen King introducing the book and reading the first chapter of the short story featuring Holly – which is titled If It Bleeds. All the stories in the book are really good and all are touched with the weirdness, mystery and suspense that King is known for.

If It Bleeds

The only other book I read this month was Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party, Alexander McCall Smith (actually a novella at 144 pages). I picked this book for the JUNE Monthly Motif Reading Challenge – Name or Number. It was supposed to be a funny book having won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction (2015).Alas, I found this a tad trite, cruel and boring. I guess this is the type of humor where it’s at the expense of someone, and in this case – that someone is Fatty – and I don’t care for that type of humor.


Although I didn’t get the 6 or so books I would have liked to read, I’m happy enough to have gotten my reading mojo back. And writing this post reminding me how much I love the process of actually choosing a book to read! What’s the last book you read and why did you choose it?

Twitter
Email
Pocket
Facebook

// Comments are closed //