This was actually a nice normal month. It didn’t feel like it flew by and it didn’t feel like it dragged either. Maybe this means I’ve started to find equilibrium in life?
We started off the month with a Macaroon class at our local Sur La Table and I was very impressed with our product. I can’t wait to try at home now I know basically everything we could do wrong we did last time we tried.
Books and Bookish Things
I finally finished the tome that is Adam Tooze’s Crashed. I started it back in November and slowly worked my way through the last decade of world politics, financial news, and their interconnectedness. After that I basically moved into the library with the next five books on my list all coming in from being on hold or my grabbing them when I went to pick up the others 😀
I surprisingly read NINE books in January. It doesn’t hurt that four of them were graphic novels/comic compilations/manga and that two of them were in a great quick-read series (Crazy Rich Asians), but who looks at that these days? 😀
- Crashed – Adam Tooze
- Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) – Robert Galbraith
- #Hockey (Check, Please! #1) – Ngozi Ukazu
- Fence Vol. 1 (Fence #1) – C.S. Pacat, Johanna the Mad, and Joana LaFuente
- China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians #2) – Kevin Kwan
- Rich People Problems (Crazy Rich Asians #3) – Kevin Kwan
- River Queens – Alexander Watson
- Tableau Num̩ro 20 РEst Em
- Bob’s Burgers: Volume 1 (Bob’s Burgers #1) – Chad Brewster, Jeff Drake, Rachel Hastings, Justin Hook, and Mike Olsen
I picked up two books not from the library, both ARCs:Â When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan and Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg. I requested a couple of other galleys, but we’ll see if they come through.
I’m super excited to read about Buttigieg as he’s the first out LGBT person to even create a presidential exploratory committee. I don’t know how far he’ll get, but it’s definitely history making.
We did spend time at the New-York Historical Society: Harry Potter: A History of Magic exhibition. It was wonderful. I really appreciated the historical context of Rowling’s works and it really made me want to go see the Cornwall Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (something I didn’t even know existed)! I was a little disappointed at how crowded it was and how little parents seemed to know what the exhibit was. So many kids were running around bored because it was geared toward a historical context of taking the classes/characters of Harry Potter and placing them with historical items along snippets of Rowling’s personal collection, think unpublished/draft chapters and drawings.
These are the two coolest things that I came across that were book related this past month on social media. It’s a little biased because they’re both Colossal, but Colossal is a wonderful resource and if you don’t follow it you should.
Discarded books get a second chance in Mike Stilkey’s towering installations https://t.co/9h3d1REJUr pic.twitter.com/EypIUoLhdU
— Colossal (@Colossal) January 15, 2019
Culture Corner
I mentioned NYC above, in addition to Harry Potter: A History of Magic, we did a few touristy things including the Tenement Museum, One World Trade, and the New York Stock Exchange, but the main reason we went to NYC this year was to see Kinky Boots before it left Broadway and it was FANTASTIC! We bought tickets for it back in November and I honestly had no idea we bought tickets as close as we did. We also saw Wicked which was great, but I was a little overwhelmed. I think so many people talked it up that I just expected to be WOWED by it and I just wasn’t. The slide show of everything else is below.
What’s Next?
I’m hoping to make progress on the five ARC/galleys I all but abandoned in 2018. I’m half way through River Queens by Alexander Watson and we’ll see what comes next. I’ve got a few more comics/graphic novels to read/pick up that I’ll thread in and out of the books I’m reading. And I’m already planning my reading list for the cruise we’re going on in March.
Those macaroons are so pretty!
Thanks! I need to try to make them at home again now I’ve taken the class.
Sounds like you had a great month, so did I… even though the Media and my co-workers keep trying to tell me January is the most miserable month! 😀
Haahaa. Yeah. I kept hearing about blue Monday and I was like I had a great day.
Great reading month. Love that tree library!
The Harry Potter exhibit sounded a little frustrating with the bored kids but would still be cool to check out.
It was wonderful. I just wish the parents would’ve done their research. I knew exactly what the exhibit was going in!