Weekly Round Up: A Kindle Overflow

 

A weekly round up: eats, watches, reads, and whatever else is on my mind.

Eats

Budget Bytes's mushroom patty melts caught my eye.  I could see that between the caramelized onions and baked portabellos that it was not a quick recipe, but I thought that it would be worth it.  I made them for a dinner for two night when the boys were off with their friends.

Apart from halving the recipe, I made it pretty much as written.

As I imagined, it was time consuming but also yummy.  It was not difficult, apart from an obstacle between me and the counter.

In other food news, thanks to Costco I am now an Aldi shopper!  I will explain: Costco used to have excellent frozen sausage egg biscuits, but they haven't had them for over six months now, and the standard Jimmy Dean sausage biscuit that is available at a every grocery store on the planet just isn't the same.  I've slowly been making the rounds to see what the next best option is.  Aldi was the winner, and I do not hate the price.  There are a couple of Aldis in my area, but none of them are in a convenient location, and until now I haven't had an "I can only get that at Aldi" food staple in my life.  

Watching

We're still going strong on the final season of Seinfeld.  It's a Festivus miracle!

Reading

It never rains but it pours.  At this time last week I had a full Libby hold list of hot titles with long wait times, and now these books are all sitting on my Kindle/Libby audio player.  Normally I'm very disciplined about only having a few books checked out at one time but for whatever reason as each title came in it felt right to click the go button.  Lemme give you the run down:

Last week I'd started The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark, which is hot, hot, hot and I've loved previous books by this author.  Well, by the 20% mark I found myself not caring about any of the characters, or whether the main character's father had or hadn't killed his siblings, so it was an easy DNF.

Out of all the new books, the one I had the least hopes for was Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up by Dave Barry.  I loooooved Dave Barry when I was a kid, and I remembered that I read his stuff to the point where I had it memorized, but I haven't thought about him since.  I heard about the new book from an NYT article, which raved about the book so much that of course I put in a hold for it, but I had this thought in the back of my mind that maybe what was funny in middle school would not be funny now.

Well, within a few minutes of listening, all of those thoughts went out the window.  I do remember the humor style, but it's been so long that it feels fresh and like catching up with an old friend.  As we learn in the first few paragraphs, this is someone who plays in a rock band with Stephen King, so this is not your average "I was born and now I'm an adult with a book deal" memoir.  This book is laugh out loud funny, and heart achingly poignant.  My review from two hours in to a seven hour audiobook is that I want to make this one last as long as possible to savor it.

Next up: Maggie: Or a Man and Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee.  He tells her he's having an affair with a woman named Maggie, she finds out that she has breast cancer and nicknames her tumor Maggie.  This book has a lot of buzz on it, and I found the first few chapters to be delightful, but then it settled into a stream of consciousness groove and I got bored.  I feel like I have room for exactly one stream of consciousness book per year, and I already filled the quota with Chemistry by Weike Wang, so Maggie became a DNF.

Currently: One Good Thing by Georgia Hunter.  This is the same author as We Were the Lucky Ones, which I finally got around to reading earlier this year and adored.  We're still dealing with the Jewish experience in WWII, but this time we're in Italy, which was a little different and yet all too much the same.  The main character flees with her best friend's young son, who is the one good thing of the title.  My opinion at the 30% mark is that if for some reason you can only read one of Hunter's books that you should read Lucky, but One Good Thing is a worthy follow up.

If you're curious, here are the books that are still waiting on my Kindle in order of due date.  In theory I *could* finish them by their due dates, but it's more likely that I'll end up putting my Kindle in airplane mode to stretch out the hold times:

The Unwedding by Ally Conde - from this MMD round up.  If someone describes a book as "Agatha Christie meets White Lotus" there is a 100% chance that I will impulsively click the check out button even with a full stack of books on my Kindle.

Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell - I've had this on hold for months and it's come in several times and I've pushed it back so many times that it's time to either read it or get it off my hold list.  The issue is that it's about domestic violence, so I'm having trouble getting in the right headspace to take it on.  I heard about it on the Sarah's Bookshelves podcast, and I know from the few pages that I sampled that it has the potential to be really good.  And that it will most likely be a  "hard" good.

Broken Country by Clare Lesley Hall.  Another Sarah's rec, and the Hot It book of the summer.

Life Stuff

Werk: nothing new to report.  I continue to collect a paycheck, and that's about it.  I feel less interested in working part time that I did last week.

Vacay: I am counting down the hours until I get on a plane!  There are still a lot of hours to go, but the clock will get there.

Peace Out!  Do you have too many books checked out of the library right now?