Books on Thursday

I read a couple of books this week. They were both 3.5 stars which normally makes me think "meh", but both of these had some interesting things going on.

I'm glad I took a chance on this one. I don't often choose from the free monthly Amazon First Reads selections because, in my experience, you tend to get what you pay for. This time, though, I decided to give I've Got a New Complaint a try, and it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Laurie Notaro's (no relation to Tig) collection of essays captures the strange stage of life where you're juggling aging parents, your own aches and pains, and the realization that you have somehow become the adult in every situation. Her observations are often exaggerated for comedic effect, but they're rooted in experiences that will feel familiar to many readers.

As with most essay collections, some pieces landed better than others. A few had me smiling more than laughing out loud, while others showcased Notaro's wonderfully dry, self-deprecating wit. I especially enjoyed her sharp sense of humor and the way she finds comedy in everything from office politics to getting older and all the indignities that come with it.

The biggest compliment I can give I've Got a New Complaint is that it made me want to read more of Laurie Notaro's work. If her other books have the same blend of wit, honesty, and humor, I'll happily pick up another one. Three and a half stars.

 

I picked up Seek Immediate Shelter after spotting it on President Obama's summer reading list and the premise immediately grabbed me. A false ballistic missile alert sends an entire Massachusetts town into crisis, and for a few terrifying minutes everyone believes they're living their final moments. What follows isn't so much a thriller as a series of interconnected character studies exploring what people reveal about themselves when they think there's no tomorrow.

The novel is structured as a collection of vignettes, with each chapter focusing on a different person affected by the alert. Some stories resonated with me more than others, but together they create an interesting portrait of a community and the complicated relationships that exist beneath everyday life. Vincent Yu does a thoughtful job showing how one brief moment of panic can expose years of buried resentments, regrets, and unspoken feelings.

I found myself imagining what I would do if I received a message like that. One of the characters, Nina, uses what she believes are her last moments to send a cruel text to her daughter. I simply couldn't relate to that reaction. I'd like to think my instinct would be to call or text my own kids to tell them I loved them and hope for the best. That contrast made me reflect on the choices the characters make and what those choices say about them.

While I appreciated the novel's ambition and its exploration of second chances, the vignette format kept me from becoming deeply invested in many of the characters before moving on to the next perspective. A few storylines lingered with me long after I finished, while others felt less fully developed.

Overall, this is a thoughtful and compassionate debut that asks compelling questions about love, regret, forgiveness, and what truly matters when we believe time has run out. It didn't completely win me over emotionally, but it certainly gave me plenty to think about, and I'll be interested to see what Vincent Yu writes next. Three and a half stars, but I think it would be absolutely wonderful to talk about books with Obama!

Now I'd love to know what you're reading!  

Unraveled Wednesday: 8/5/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today with a third completed dish towel. Now the stack I envisioned gifting to Ryan is real.

I still haven't washed them but will do that sometime in the near future. They're fairly large, 17' x 27", but I know they'll shrink in the dryer. I just don't know how much yet. 

It's still hot and rainy so I won't be sitting outside stitching a badger anytime soon. Instead I've just cast on for another dish towel, but using a different yarn and pattern. Nested Squares in CotLin is an easy pattern with a nice yarn and should keep me happily knitting dish towels for another month or so. I thought I ordered the yarn in a deep purple, but this Sagebrush doesn't look the least bit purple. I might have to remedy that.    

What are you making this first Wednesday in August? 

Read With Us Lounge: 8/3/26

One of the main ideas behind the Read With Us Lounge has been that reading should bring us more freedom, not more rules.

Many of us carry around an invisible list of "shoulds" when it comes to reading. We should finish every book we start. We should read the classics. We should read books in order. We should read the book before watching the movie. We should always start at page one and never, ever peek at the ending. You don't write in your books and you never dog-ear pages. Audiobooks don't count as "real" reading. 

But where did all those rules come from? And more importantly ... do they actually make us happier readers?

I've known people who read the last chapter first. At first, that sounded completely wrong to me. Wouldn't it spoil the whole book? Then I heard someone explain that knowing the ending allows them to relax and enjoy the journey. Instead of wondering what will happen, they pay attention to how the author gets there. They notice the breadcrumbs, the small moments, the clever turns of phrase that might otherwise be overlooked. I don't personally read that way, but I understand the appeal now.

I'm not about to make more reading rules, but I hereby declare that yes, audiobooks are real reading (for me, anyway.) I think that many audiobooks bring me one step closer to a story, removing the middleman of paper or a screen. 

Whether you're turning pages or listening while driving, walking, knitting, folding laundry, or pulling weeds in the garden, you're still experiencing the author's story. You're meeting the characters, following the plot, laughing, wondering, learning, and sometimes crying. The words are reaching you through your ears instead of your eyes, but they are still the author's words. In fact, stories were spoken long before they were printed. Listening isn't a lesser form of reading; it connects us to one of humanity's oldest traditions.

Once you start questioning one reading rule, it's amazing how many others begin to fall away.

Maybe you like to read several books at once because your mood changes from day to day. Maybe you reread favorite books every few years because they become different books as you become a different reader. Maybe you skip long descriptions, read mysteries only after someone has spoiled the ending, abandon books that aren't working, or spend an entire summer reading nothing but memoirs. None of those habits make you a "bad" reader. They simply make you your kind of reader.

That's one of the reasons we wanted this group to exist. Not to tell us what we should be reading or how we should be reading it, but to remind us that there are countless ways to build a reading life. The goal isn't to read the "right" books or the "right" way. I think it's to keep reading in ways that make us curious, joyful, comforted, challenged, or simply happy to pick up the next book.

So this week, I'm curious...

What's one reading "rule" you've broken? How did it affect your reading life?

Please share your reading quirks. I have a feeling many of us may discover we're not nearly as unusual as we thought.

Be sure and visit Kym and Carole to see what they're talking about today. 

 

Books on Thursday

I read several ARCs this week but will review them closer to their publication date. I did read one other book after hearing about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey almost everywhere I turned.  

I'm not nearly as familiar with The Odyssey as I probably should be, but even with only a basic knowledge of the original, I'm fairly certain I appreciated Margaret Atwood's retelling more than I would Homer's epic.

By allowing Penelope and the twelve hanged maids to tell their own stories, Atwood shifts the focus away from the celebrated hero and toward those who were expected to wait patiently while history glorified someone else's adventures. I couldn't help thinking that if I had been in Penelope's place, Odysseus and I would have had some very serious conversations when he finally deigned to return home after twenty years of wandering, monster-slaying, and "spending time" with various goddesses.

What I admire most about Atwood is her ability to subvert familiar narratives without dismissing them. Her deep knowledge of and respect for the original myth is evident throughout, even as she playfully pokes holes in its assumptions. The novel is witty, clever, and often surprisingly funny, but beneath the humor is a sharp examination of whose voices are preserved, whose are ignored, and how gender and class shape the stories that survive.

The Penelopiad is brief but thought-provoking. It made me want to revisit The Odyssey with fresh eyes, and that's probably one of the highest compliments a retelling can earn. I just wish I was better at pronouncing Margaret Atwood's title. 

Now I'd love to know what you're reading! 

 

Unraveled Wednesday: 7/29/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today with a completed wolf on Justin's hat. 

It took me a couple of afternoons sitting outside in the shade to complete him. 

 

I've readjusted his eyes four times and I still can't get them to match, so further eye adjustment will have to wait until I have more patience.  The good news is that I only have one more animal to stitch. It's a badger and only uses four colors so that's a little extra good news.

 

We're in a prolonged period of humidity, severe storms, and hail but no tornadoes yet. It doesn't present any good opportunities for outdoor stitching for a while, so it's back to kitchen towel knitting. 

 

What are you making this final Wednesday in July?  

Read With Us: John of John

It's my turn to talk about our Summer 2026 Read With Us book, John of John by Douglas Stuart. We've read Stuart's other two novels, Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, but I think this one is his best yet. 

There are many reasons to read Stuart's newest novel (stunning portraits of a father and son, an examination of how faith and identity can collide, it balances heartbreak with hope, along with many others) but one of the things that struck me the most was the ways in which color is used, especially in weaving which plays a large part. 

One of the most beautiful aspects of John of John is the way Douglas Stuart describes weaving not as a static craft, but as something almost alive. Rather than treating color as individual threads, he often emphasizes what happens when colors are brought together under tension. The cloth becomes a conversation between colors.

Several patterns emerge in his descriptions:

Color as interaction

Instead of naming a single color, Stuart frequently describes how one shade changes another.

The warp and weft create:

• colors that deepen when crossed

• shades that seem to emerge only from a distance

• patterns that shimmer as the cloth moves

• hues that appear different depending on the light

The emphasis is on the relationship between colors rather than isolated pigments.

Colors borrowed from nature

The weaving is often described using colors familiar from the Scottish landscape:

• heather purple

• peat brown

• lichen green

• sea-grey

• storm blue

• oat and barley gold

• cream wool

• weathered stone

Rather than sounding like a paint chart, the colors feel organic and rooted in place.

Mixing without blending

A hallmark of woven cloth is that colors remain distinct threads while creating a new visual effect together. Stuart captures this beautifully. Instead of saying colors are mixed, he suggests they:

• flicker

• pulse

• break against one another

• soften each other

• create a color that exists only when viewed as cloth

This reflects the optical blending that happens in tweed and tartan, where blue and yellow threads may read as green from a distance.

Cloth as light

He also pays close attention to how woven wool catches light.

Colors may appear:

• dull in shadow

• luminous in morning light

• silvered by rain

• warmed by afternoon sun

The fabric changes throughout the day, making color something dynamic rather than fixed.

The emotional resonance of color

Because weaving is deeply tied to the characters' work and identity, color choices often carry emotional significance. Certain combinations evoke memory, family, or a particular landscape. A bolt of cloth can feel like an attempt to capture a hillside, a season, or a place that matters.

Precision without technicality

Although Stuart clearly understands weaving, he rarely overwhelms the reader with technical dye or textile vocabulary. Instead, he writes in sensory terms. You don't need to know anything about weaving to appreciate descriptions that make you see and almost feel the cloth.

For example, rather than cataloging colors, he might evoke a fabric that appears:

• "stormy" rather than merely grey,

• "bracken-colored" rather than simply brown,

• "like winter sunlight on water" instead of just silver.

Why it works

Stuart's descriptions mirror the craft itself. Weaving is about many individual threads creating something richer than any one thread alone. Likewise, his color descriptions are cumulative. He layers small observations until the reader perceives a complex whole, much as the eye perceives the blended colors of a finely woven tweed.

It's a fitting metaphor for the novel itself: individual lives, memories, and histories crossing one another to create something stronger and more beautiful than their separate strands.

The hardcover and audiobook versions have a manageable hold queue at my libraries, so I hope that is also the case for you. After reading it with my eyes the first time, my re-read is the audiobook, narrated by Lorne Macfadyen in a wonderful (but still understandable) brogue.

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout July and August. Discussion day for John of John is scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 7:00 pm Eastern time, so mark your calendars. We'll ask questions on our blogs that day and then host the always educational and illuminating Zoom discussion. I think this is my favorite Douglas Stuart novel so far, and one that is also very discussable, so I hope you'll Read With Us!

Bonus: Observer article about Douglas Stuart and Hebridean weavers. 

Read With Us Lounge: 7/27/26

In keeping with the RWU Lounge motto (No Rules, Just Fun), I've been thinking about book covers and how they can affect so much, like whether I take a closer look at the book, whether I choose to check it out, and my impressions of the story before I even begin. 

There's an old saying that we're not supposed to judge a book by its cover. It's good advice for people. For books? I'm not so sure.

The truth is, I judge books by their covers all the time.

Not completely, of course. A beautiful cover won't make me love a bad book, and an ugly cover won't keep me from reading something that's been highly recommended. But covers absolutely influence what catches my eye in the library, what I linger over in a bookstore, and even what I click on when I'm browsing ebooks.

A cover is often my first conversation with a book.

Sometimes it's the colors. Sometimes it's the typography. Sometimes it's an illustration that makes me wonder, What's going on here? Other times it's the opposite; a cover feels so generic that I pass it by without giving it a second thought.

What's interesting is that covers don't just persuade us to pick up a book. They also quietly shape our expectations before we've read a single sentence.

A moody landscape tells me to expect something literary and introspective. Bright illustrated figures make me think the book might be funny or heartwarming. A house in the woods? Probably secrets. Flowers and birds? Maybe historical fiction. Bold block letters? Perhaps nonfiction or a thriller. Whether those assumptions turn out to be right is another matter entirely.

Sometimes a cover prepares me perfectly for what's inside. Other times it feels like it belongs to an entirely different book.

I've also noticed that once I've read a book, I often see the cover differently. An image that seemed ordinary suddenly feels full of meaning because I understand the references. Colors, objects, and little design choices take on significance that I completely missed the first time around.

And then there are those books that get redesigned. Occasionally I love the new edition, but sometimes I find myself strangely loyal to the cover I first encountered. It's as if that's the "real" book in my memory, even though the words inside haven't changed.

It's fascinating to think about how much work a cover has to do. In one image, it has to attract attention, hint at the mood, appeal to the intended audience, and somehow stand out among thousands of other books competing for our attention.

No pressure!

How much do book covers influence your reading?

• Have you ever picked up a book because of its cover?

• Have you ever avoided one because the cover didn't appeal to you?

• Is there a cover you absolutely love, even if the book itself wasn't a favorite?

• Have you ever been surprised by how different a book was from what its cover suggested?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Maybe we aren't supposed to judge books by their covers, but I have a feeling every reader does, at least a little.

Bonus: A little extra story about the cover for John of John by Douglas Stuart.