The Autumn season is prime book-reading time. The rainy and cold weather means I want to stay inside and read and there seem to be so many books to read. The autumn is when many new books are released (leading up to Christmas) and many of the major literary prize winners (and shortlists) are announced. My To Be Read list is so long that I’ve been sorting books into piles and my bedside table is stacked high. A friend also loaned me the three memoirs in this month’s What I Read list.
Fortunately (maybe?) Pearl is going through a stage where she wants one of us to sit in her room while she falls asleep. When I stopped nursing, my reading time seemed to decrease drastically but it’s bounced back up this month. Most evenings I spend between 30 minutes to an hour in Pearl’s room, curled up in a chair, leaning as close to the nightlight as I can get. There are worse things.
Wenjack – Joseph Boyden (Hamish Hamilton, 2016)
The Trees – Ali Shaw (Bloomsbury, 2016)
An Invisible Thread – Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski (Howard Books, 2011)
The Dirty Life – Kristin Kimball (Scribner, 2010)
Half Broke Horses – Jeannette Walls (Scribner, 2009)
Waiting for the Cyclone – Leesa Dean (Brindle & Glass, 2016)
Re-read: Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage, 2000)
“You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamourous, war-loving dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
Currently Reading:
Prayer – Timothy Keller
By Gaslight – Steven Price
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
And a reminder that you can follow me on Instagram @karissareadsbooks and see up-to-the-minute photographic evidence of what I’m reading! Whether or not that sounds remotely appealing probably says a lot about you.
Karissa Reads Books 
Encouraging that you wanted to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five, since I’ll soon be reading it for the first time. I’m going to take that as a good omen…
It is excellent – and I wouldn’t necessarily say that about other Vonnegut I’ve read. I think I actually liked this one better the second time around. I remembered it as somewhat disjointed but found it to be a much smoother read this time. I think it’s one of the best war books out there.