This year has seen many changes to my reading habits. They continue to change so I haven’t been able to pin them all down, but one of the changes has been that I’ve been giving into mood reading. Mood reading isn’t conducive to keeping up with book clubs, so it’s quite lucky that my reads happened to coincide with that of my friends’, making for three buddy reads of the seven books I read this month.

July’s reading highlight has been discovering an all-time favourite—Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi—making for a humble total of three this year so far. Another highlight has been “rereading” The Hunger Games on audio. I’m still deciding whether to add them to my annual count of books read, but I’m leaning towards not, because I’m much more of a visual learner and engage with audio so differently. But I just wanted to throw in this update and say that: 1) the series holds up and 2) it hits different in 2020.

Published by Doubleday on 10 Mar 2015
Goodreads

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –

Published by Little, Brown and Company on 04 Feb 2020
Goodreads

For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air. When, one day, she finally musters the courage to introduce herself, the chemistry between them is undeniable: Thomas is wise, witty, handsome, mysterious, clearly a kindred spirit. There’s just one tiny problem: He’s dead.

Stuck in a surreal limbo governed by bureaucracy, Thomas is unable to “cross over” to the afterlife until he completes a 90-day stint on earth, during which time he is forbidden to get involved with a member of the living — lest he incur “regrets.” When Thomas and Rachel break this rule, they unleash a cascade of bizarre, troubling consequences.

Set in the hallucinatory borderland between life and death, The Regrets is a gloriously strange and breathtakingly sexy exploration of love, the cataclysmic power of fantasies, and the painful, exhilarating work of waking up to reality, told with uncommon grace and humor by a visionary artist at the height of her imaginative power.

Ah, right. Time is a thing. No longer marked by minutes, days, weeks. But by increasingly bright dinners as summer settles. By emptying and replenishing a jar of instant coffee like an hourglass. By stamps on a boba shop loyalty card. By the blossoming colours on my paint-by-numbers canvas. By an incriminating pile of newly bought books inching taller and taller, a physical manifestation of library withdrawal…