It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

“It’s Monday! What are you reading?” is a weekly event hosted by Sheila at Bookjourney to share with others what you’ve read the past week and planning to read next.

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Blogging-wise, last week was busy: It was BBAW week (Book Bloggers Appreciation Week), a chance to tell your readers about yourself, to make new book blogger friends and be part of the book blogger community. It was great, but a bit hectic.

Wednesday, my country voted for a new government. As we have many parties, no one party is ever the biggest, but this time it was a close run between two parties. Neither has enough votes to work on their own so they have to form alliances with some other party/parties. A four-party government isn’t unheard of in the Netherlands! Nothing is decided yet. It can take months!

I find voting so terribly low-key: you go to a school or other public building. Some booths have been set up (for instance in the PE hall). You hand over your card and ID, get a voting form, go into the booth, colour red the dot in front of the person you want to vote for, and hand in your form. Done. No trumpets and cheering. No one saying: “Thank you SO much for your vote!” You just leave the hall and go home again.

Very nice, though, was the book swap I went to on Saturday. There is an online group of bookish women that talk books via a mailing list. Sometimes they meet up, for instance to swap books. This time it was in my area, and so I went, with 50 books in a suitcase. Another 9 women showed up, with hundreds of books and we had a fun afternoon choosing from the books. The left-over books will go to a community centre. I only took 4 books for myself – but they were books I really, really wanted. See my Dutch blog for some pictures.

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Books I finished in the last week: 4

Click on the blue links to see the review

Shelter by Frances Greenslade. The life of two sisters is turned upside down when their father dies. Their mother doesn’t know how to cope and abandons them with another couple. 4.5 stars Contemporary Fiction

The Mall by S. L. Grey. A woman out shopping in a South African mall discovers the boy she’s looking after has run off. She forces a bookshop employee to help her find him back and they end up in an alternate mall, where they are characters in a game. 4.5 stars Science Fiction

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro. Five short stories, beautifully written. 4 stars

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander. A Jewish family move houses and find that Anne Frank has survived WWII and is living in their attic. She’s not welcome, but how can a Jew throw out Anne Frank? 4.5 stars

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Books I’m reading and planning to read

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Reviews

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin. In the late 19th Century an older man farming an orchard is visited by two pregnant girls who do not want to leave again. He takes care of them, and their offspring. 4.5 stars

Also check out

I took part in the Book Bloggers Appreciation Week last week. I wrote five posts: Appreciate (other bloggers); Interview Swap (with Teresa of Teresa’s Reading Corner); What Book Blogging Means to Me; A Book that I Love; The End (roundup of the week).

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That’s it!

What are you reading this week?