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The Sunday Post is a chance to recap the past week, talk about next week, tell you what I’m reading, and share news. It’s hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer, Readerbuzz, and Book Date.

 

 

 

The Sunday Post #251

 

 

 

 

Public Service Announcement

 

Thanksgiving is over! That means it’s now Christmas and everybody is scrambling to buy cheap stuff. If you need holiday gifts for bookworms, check out Book Depository’s Gift Guides. The guides are organized by genre and have brand new discounted books for the whole family. They even have journals and stationary. I see bestsellers, funny books, nonfiction, cookbooks, and children’s books. Also, a few beautiful editions of classics that I’ll probably buy for myself, let’s be honest. Click here to see the guides.

 

 

On The Blog Last Week

 

• On Saturday there was a book haul.

 

 

 

 

On The Blog This Week

 

• On Tuesday I list some books I can’t stop thinking about and desperately want to reread.

 

 

 

 

In My Reading Life

 

Last week, I finished the memoir In The Days Of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult by Rebecca Stott. It’s beautifully written. I love the author’s descriptions of the English countryside. They make me wish I could travel. The book is mostly about the author’s father. He was a Shakespearian actor, a gambling addict, a former prisoner, and a high-ranking member of a religious cult. This memoir is his daughter’s attempt to sort out his messy history in order to understand him better. I have mixed feelings about the book. When the author writes about her own experiences, it’s fascinating. She was a paranoid child whose life revolved around the strict rules of a cult. Then a sex scandal caused the cult to fall apart, and her whole life suddenly changed. She didn’t have her church friends or her community anymore. She had to adapt quickly to a new life.

 

“I was constantly watching—or listening—for Satan, hearing the tapping of his hooves on the cobblestones in the streets of Brighton, looking at the children in the primary school playground and imagining the scale of the wickedness in their homes.” – In The Days Of Rain

 

I like the stories about the author’s own life, but she discusses a lot of other things too. She talks about her ancestors. And she talks about movies and poetry. That’s where I struggled. The book occasionally gets dry or pretentious or navel gazing. I found myself zoning out and wanting to skip ahead. It’s not a bad memoir, though. If you’re interested in cults, please read it.

 

Then I read Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why by Laurence Gonzales. It’s a wilderness survival book. It doesn’t have as many how-to tips as I wanted, but I still found it interesting and flew through it. The author uses research on the human brain to analyze real-life survival situations. He weaves the stories with the science, which keeps the book from being dry. My biggest complaint is that he occasionally drops story threads. I was sometimes left thinking, Wait, how did that end? How did he get rescued? If you’re interested in wilderness survival, this book is worth reading. Knowing how your brain works may help you avoid mistakes.

 

Right now I’m reading Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It’s a slow-paced classic, so it took me a while to get invested in the plot, but now I’m hooked. It’s about a lawyer who’s investigating his friend’s disappearance. I’m also reading American Radical: Inside The World Of An Undercover Muslim FBI Agent by Tamer Elnoury. It’s a memoir. The author is an Egyptian-American Muslim immigrant who speaks Arabic and was working as a detective. Then 9/11 happened, and the FBI recruited him. His job was to infiltrate a terrorist group. The book is okay so far. It’s intense, like a real-life thriller novel.

 

In The Rest Of My Life

 

Five things that made me happy last week:

 

1. Thanksgiving! If you celebrated, I hope you had a good one. I ate a lot of pie. I also learned that it’s extraordinarily difficult to find pumpkin pie in a store the night before Thanksgiving. I succeeded, though! (I probably could have made a pie in the time it took to locate one, but shhh. Let me celebrate my victory.)
2. I finished my Christmas shopping and mailed all my Christmas cards. I’m not usually this organized. (See the above story about last-minute pie shopping.)
3. I got up early on Black Friday and ran 5.2 miles. The great outdoors was very cold, very slippery, very silent, and very empty of humans. I saw tons of deer and other creatures. And I didn’t die on the ice! *Pats self on back.*
4. I spent the rest of Black Friday reading books and eating leftovers. It was excellent.
5. I’m giving away a book shopping spree! Thank you to everybody who has already entered. Please enter, if you haven’t. Let me give you things!

 

 

 

 

I’m Stuffed With Holiday Cheer

 

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Take care of yourselves and be kind to each other. See you around the blogosphere!