Happy Monday, book buds, and happy Labor Day to my friends in the States! I've been unemployed for about a month now, so I have to admit that this whole three-day weekend thing means less to me than usual. I fully deserve any tomatoes you hurl my way.

I forgot to update y'all about my Bout of Books progress last Monday, and suffice it to say that I did not read a whole lot. Thankfully, the lovely Jenna of JMillWanders hosted the Take Back Your Shelves Readathon this weekend (still going today, too!) and I finally, finally managed to get N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon under my belt via audio.

I just checked, and I've posted about reading or wanting to read this book no fewer than eight times since last August, so it was about time. Sadly, the writing was a lot clunkier and the metaphors far more heavy-handed than those of the exquisite/wonderful/my bae The Fifth Season, but her world building is as glorious as always. I ended up grabbing its follow-up, The Shadowed Sun, to listen to today. Despite real differences in quality among the novels, I want to read Jemisin's oeuvre, so I will, dang it.

I also started Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer during Bout of Books 17 but sort of dropped it during my Jemisin audio fest, so I hope to jump back into that this week. I've only tried reading one other Foer before (Everything is Illuminated during a particularly tumultuous time in junior year of college), and I couldn't get through it. Naturally, I decided that his part-memoir, part-investigation of the world of factory and family farming might go over better. It's the first bit of food/diet-related nonfiction that I've read since Animal Liberation, and I'm learning a lot. For instance, did y'all know about fecal soup and how much of it commercial chicken absorbs during processing? Maybe you didn't want to know that.

Foer fans: what other novel can I try of his? I feel like I didn't give his fiction a fair shake the first time around.

Happy reading!