Library Monday on a Tuesday, and Some Other Stuff

My library trip this week only yielded one book: The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared. I'd put this on hold because some of my fondest memories from my childhood involve picking out two books before bedtime, then sitting on my mom's lap while she read them to me. I had quite a few favorites that I'd heard so many times that I could tell when Mom skipped a part!

I'm in a little bit of a funk today, probably because of my busy weekend. On Saturday I helped Adam host a picnic for a tennis league he's trying to get started up. What we did not realize, unfortunately, was that Saturday was the boys' high school state tennis championships, so the turnout wasn't quite what we'd hoped. We still had a good time, though, and we have enough hot dogs to last us for approximately the rest of our lives. After that, we took a windy 13-mile bike ride. We'd planned to go further, but we were both pretty tired so we decided to head home early.

On Sunday, we spent about six or seven hours on yard work. The forecast called for storms so we were only going to work until it started raining, but it never started raining. We did get quite a bit done, but I was exhausted when it got dark and we finally came inside.

On Monday, we woke up early to take a bike ride. We were going to ride about thirty miles south, grab a bite to eat in another town, then head back. I figured the ride would take about seven or eight hours, including lunch.

However, as soon as we started riding south down our street I could tell that the wind was going to be wicked, and I wasn't wrong. I checked my phone during one of our many rest stops and saw that the wind was blowing at a constant 20-25 MPH with gusts up to 40 MPH. I'm pretty sure I felt some of those gusts--there were times when I probably could have gone faster if I'd gotten off my bike and walked. We averaged about 7 MPH for much of the trip and the 30-mile ride ended up taking five hours, including rest stops.

We shared a big order of boneless chicken wings for lunch, then headed home. The ride back was pretty nice, although it would have been better if we hadn't been so tired from the first part of our trip. We were able to coast quite a bit at around 20 MPH with the wind at our backs. The ride back only took about 2.5-3 hours. In total, we were gone for almost ten hours.

Anyway, this is all to say that today I can't quite muster the energy to do much of anything. Also contributing to my reading ennui might be the fact that I finished Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge last night. It was quite an intense reading experience--I'll write more about it tomorrow, but now I'm having trouble deciding what to read next. Tomorrow is Day 1 of the Books I Should Have Read By Now Challenge, so maybe that will get me on a roll again.

Library Loot

I stopped at the library today to return some books and pick up a couple that were on hold for me. Here's my stack, a relatively short one this time:

I reserved In the Garden of Beasts quite awhile ago, as soon as I noticed it on a list of books that were going to be published this spring. I listened to the audio version of The Devil in the White City several years ago and loved it, though I haven't read any more of Erik Larson's books since. I do have Thunderstruck on my bookshelf but just haven't picked it up yet. In the Garden of Beasts is about a subject that fascinates me; the subtitle is Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. Can't wait to dig into this one!

I doubt that Berlin Noir would have caught my interest if I hadn't heard Nancy Pearl mention it on the most recent Nancy Pearl Book Reviews Podcast. I've had very good luck with Nancy Pearl recommendations (including, most recently, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett) and this one sounded like it would appeal to me. It's another one about Nazi Germany. It's sort of a coincidence that I checked out two books about Nazi Germany on the same day, but sort of not really because I tend to be drawn to books about the World War II era.

Finally, A Fire Upon the Deep by Verner Vinge is slightly outside my usual reading habits, but I was in the mood for some science fiction after finishing Jo Walton's Among Others yesterday, which was a Books on the Nightstand recommendation. I really loved this book about a young girl who is socially awkward but finds solace in books (not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.) Most of her reading material is from the science fiction and fantasy genres. I saw the Vinge on the shelf at the library and remembered that the professor of the science fiction class I took in college mentioned this as a particularly good novel. I made the mistake of looking at reviews online after I got home and seeing that feelings about this book are very mixed, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. The Goodreads average was just over four stars, so it can't be too bad.

My biggest victory on today's library trip was managing to return twice as many books as I came home with. Anyone who could see my shelves of unread books at home would probably wonder why I even bother going to the library, but I just can't resist picking up a few new-to-me books once in awhile. And hey, it's free!