Thursday, April 5

Thursday thanks

Quiet morning: Kindle and coffee...
Rain on the windowpanes.
Hot cup of coffee.
No early workout scheduled before the workday begins.
And a fresh new book waiting to be read...

I'm thankful for good books (because, you know, sometimes I need things to do when I'm on an airplane, resting after a long run, or just enjoying a quiet morning).

Here on the blog, I generally only review books on sports or travel (in keeping with the blog theme). But don't let that fool you: I am an omnivorous and voracious reader.

Over the past couple of months I've finished:
Of those, Cold Comfort Farm was a book I could not put down. The heroine was completely adorable. (It's no surprise Gibbons' book makes the BBC's top 100 list.) Things Fall Apart was similarly compelling, but for entirely different reasons. Achebe's book is dark where Gibbons' is light, but both are excellent reads.

On the other side of the intellectual spectrum, the Bitch-Proof Suit was little more than a beach read (but an entertaining one at that).

Two Old Fools is the second non-fiction memoir of a British couple that packs up their life and moves to the Spanish countryside. (My desire to go to Barcelona last year was in no small part fueled by books like "Old Fools.")

Sadly, of the five, the only one I did not gush over was The Jade Rabbit. The main character is a female marathon runner struggling to overcome some serious life challenges. By all accounts, Jade Rabbit should have been a book I loved. But the text was littered with grammar errors. Moreover, a key theme was the main character's struggle to get pregnant, and the writing on that topic felt stilted at best. (Maybe because the author, a man, has never tried to get pregnant?)

But now I'm on to other pages...
Cutting for Stone has totally sucked me in... So now, please excuse me while I go read a few more pages before work.

What types of books do you "usually" read?
What are you reading right now?