It's Monday....what am I reading?

Seems like I mainly get to this blog on Mondays, but I've been more active on Facebook and Twitter these days.  It's so quick to post links and updates via those other two media, and I"m getting lazy in my dotage.

Anyway, it's been an interesting week on the book front. Giving up TV for Lent has vastly increased my reading time, so I've been going great guns on the Seasonal Reading Challenge over at Goodreads.  I've finished up a few books:

• In the Kitchen by Monica Ali.  A tale of a chef in an upscale London hotel restaurant, Ali's writing is crisp and enjoyable.  
• Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis, a compilation of her hilarious comic strips detailing her life in sometimes painful accuracy 
• Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me, a biography in the form of a graphic novel,  by Sarah Leavitt 
• Refresh, Refresh by James Ponsoldt, another graphic novel about teenage boys in Oregon, waiting for their fathers to return from deployment
• Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt. Detailed review to follow soon (I hope).

...and audiobooks:

• The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie.  I read all of her mysteries as a kid, but have forgotten all the plots.  This is a good one!
• Glory in Death by J.D. Robb.  The second in this series of detective novels set in NYC in 2058.  Written by Nora Roberts under a pen name, these are fast, easy reads (listens?).
• Dinner with Friends by David Margulies.  This Pulitzer Prize-winning play is not really an audiobook but a recorded play.  It involves two couples, one of whom is divorcing.  The pace is quick, the conversation very realistic, and the acting excellent.  

Currently, I'm reading the third Flavia de Luce mystery, A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Canadian Alan Bradley.  I love this series that centres around 12 year old Flavia, set in '50s England.  She lives with her father, two older sisters, and a cook and a butler in a crumbling house and they are falling onto hard times.  Flavia makes use of her wits and her dead Uncle Tar's laboratory to solve local crimes.  Extremely well-written and engaging.  

I'm listening to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, this is not normally a book that I'd pick up, but I've read so many glowing reviews of the series that I decided to give it a go.  I'm only about 10% of the way in, but it has grabbed me and yanked me into it's dystopian world.  It's part of a trilogy, so there'll be more to come!

Books up next:

• Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers.  I think I read a review of this somewhere and put it on my hold list.  It details the life of a couple of young women sent to Canada as "filles du roi". 
• Alice, I Think by Susan Juby.  Someone wrote that the Alice series were some of their favorite books for girls and I thought I'd pick one up and check it out.  It won a bunch of awards when it was first published in 2003.
• Left Neglected by Lisa Genova.  Recently published, I must have read a good review about this somewhere and put it on my hold list!  I wish the library would allow for comments when we put books on hold so I could remember why I requested them!

And audiobooks:

• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.  Zouheir recently listened to this and comparied it favorably to Reading Lolita in Tehran, which he also enjoyed. Set during the Cultural Revolution, a suitcase full of Western novels is secretly shared.
• Shopaholic and Sister by Sophie Kinsella.  I'm new to the Shopaholic series, although I've read and very much enjoyed a number of Kinsella's other books.

I just received a review copy of Tide Road by Valerie Compton from the publisher (thanks to Goodreads book giveaways), so I'll have to fit that in somewhere soon.