It's Monday, January 25! What Are You Reading?

January 25, 2016

Happy last week of January, everyone! Can you believe it?

One of the snowiest storms to hit the East coast in recent memory came and went this weekend, and my neck of Connecticut ended up with about a foot of the stuff (AKA little more than a dusting compared to Kerry, Shannon and others' totals).

Mid-blizzard on Saturday.

You'd think this kind of weather would mean I read all the books on Saturday, but nope—echoing what Shannon said, I was too distracted to get in much more than a few hours' worth of reading. I blame cookie-baking, video games, and the general lure of mindless scrolling on the Internet.

I did finish one book! I finally polished off How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. This was a 21st birthday gift and the oldest book on my TBR pile, and I'm glad to have finally made time for it. If any of you are as nerdy about Michel de Montaigne as I am or just want to learn more about the father of the modern essay, check it out. Bakewell's biography is warm, well-researched and easy to read in bits and pieces (hence why it took me so long to settle down with it!).

I also got in some more pages of Bats of the Republic and am about halfway through now. I somehow managed to read the "secret letter" in the back of the book at the wrong point in the novel (d'oh), so I'm curious about how that will affect my enjoyment of the rest of the story.

This week, I'm going to keep plugging away at the other reads on last Monday's list. I also decided I'm going to try swapping out every nonfiction book I finish with another from my TBR. Considering I only read 13 nonfiction books out of 79 total read in 2015, I think I could use a system. In that spirit, I hope to start Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett at some point this week.

What are you reading this week?