It's Monday 1/23! What Are You Reading?

Very busy week and not a great weekend.  We enjoyed a gathering of friends on Saturday evening but spent the rest of the weekend frantically trying to get our taxes started, finish the FASFA form for college financial aid, and apply for a scholarship that requires more information than most college applications!  Very frustrating work.  Going through our medical records for taxes, I uncovered a half dozen mistakes our health insurance company made on our claims last year.  How can a company survive when they are that incompetent?  (Of course, most of the mistakes are in their favor!)  No wonder health insurance is so expensive.  So, now I have some wonderful phone calls to look forward to this week to straighten all this out.


As always, books provided a nice respite for us, although I don't think any of us had much time for reading last week:

• I am still reading Divergent by Veronica Roth (almost finished).  It's a teen dystopian novel that garnered a lot of attention when it was released last year.  It's excellent - I kept wanting to ditch all my work and read more this weekend!
• I am also still listening to an audio book, The Power of Six by Pitticus Lore, and enjoying that as well, although I'm not thrilled with the narrator of the audio.  Also, I can't figure out how to turn off Shuffle on the audio book on my iPod, so I have to stop after every chapter to find the next chapter - it's very confusing listening to the chapters out of order!  
• My husband, Ken, is still reading one of his Christmas gifts from me, In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson.  He says it's fascinating that good people didn't see what was coming with the Holocaust.
• Jamie, 17, finished The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness, Book Two in the Chaos Walking trilogy, and immediately moved onto Book Three: Monsters of Men.  He says this post-apocalyptic trilogy is excellent and just keeps getting better!
• Craig, 14, had a lot of trouble deciding what to read next, but he finally settled on Chronicles of the Red King: The Secret Kingdom by Jenny Nimmo, a prequel to one of his all-time favorite series, Charlie Bone.

I posted one review last week of The Novice: A Story of True Love, a Thai folktale about Buddhism that I enjoyed.  I also posted my list of Top Ten Books I'd Recommend To Someone Who Doesn't Normally Read YA.  And I posted a summary of the 5 Reading Challenges I've chosen to participate in for 2012 (finally!).


And, you may have noticed that I changed the look of my blog a bit.  This is actually a really big deal for me...after 6 years of blogging!  I know very little about the technical side of blogging, so changing my blog's look and finally figuring out how to add separate pages (see my new page for 2012 Challenges) was a giant step forward.  Now that I know how to do it, I may add some additional pages - tell me what pages or tabs you have on your blogs.  And I still wasn't able to add a photo to the header of my blog - I have no idea how people do such creative and unique things with their blogs!



What are you and your family reading this week?


(What are you reading Monday is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.)