My pick for my local book club this month. After a seemingly endless string of WWII fiction, this story of a crotchety Swede was a refreshing change. I love how the author uses the cat as a tool to talk about Ove's inner conflicts.

Headed to the beach! Not driving, so it's time to turn to next month's book club pick.

DBF Teen Stage is killing it today with diverse, interesting young women writers!

So wonderful to meet Kate Milford at DBF this year!

Decatur Book Festival Teen Stage, ready to go for the 11:00 panel!

Getting ready for the Decatur Book Festival Friday night Kidnote event. Long live Captain Underpants!

Ryan T. Higgins entertaining our K-1 kiddos--he was hilarious! If you're looking for a great, funny new picture book, check out Mother Bruce; it's guffaw-out-loud funny.

Love hosting an author at our K-3 school! Thanks, Sara Pennypacker!!

Books are stacked, labeled, and ready to go for Ryan T. Higgins' visit to our school tomorrow. Hysterical book--I can't wait to hear what he has to tell the kids!

Books are labeled and ready to go for Sara Pennypacker's visit to our elementary library tomorrow. What lucky kids!

Picked this up on audio from Overdrive for a weekend full of solo driving. From the title, I think I was expecting something like The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. Penumbra was certainly not that, but was a lot of fun and made the car hours fly by. Extra points for getting to hear the book's discussion of what listening to an audio book is like.

Second week of school, new job in the library. Can I tell you how happy this drawer makes me?

YA Sherlock Holmes-meets-Spiderwick Chronicles. A fun, quick read--looking forward to picking up the rest of the series.

A little light reading before the drive-in.

Time travel/time loop stories can be tough to wrap your head around, and this is the most complicated I've ever read. Like Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, but multiplied. Totally worth it--it starts out slow, but picks up speed the whole way through.

Read Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 as a quick palate-cleanser between longer books. They were fun, and unexpectedly odd in a great way. I'm glad my daughter asked me to read them. I think I will add "What in the Joan Jett?!" to my usual vocabulary.

I can see why my middle-school son was so moved by this book, and why he wanted me to read it. It still speaks to something unsettled, something raw and unfinished, in the souls of teen boys. I'm so glad it is still on the required reading list.

Today's library picks. My tween son, having read The Outsiders in 6th grade this past year, insists I must read it. Somehow it's one of those classic school assignments I missed in my own day, so I'm looking forward to seeing why it made such an impact on him.

This one was for my local (IRL) book club, chosen by another club member. Some of the characters were interesting enough, but there were far too many "and suddenly it was all clear to her, in a flash of understanding" moments for my taste--too neatly tied up in a bow.

Beautiful, and at times a little unnerving--the short stories in the collection appear at first to be separate tales, but the characters occasionally bleed through into other stories and blur the lines. Oyeyemi crafts a beautiful sentence; it was a pleasure to linger in her odd world for a while.

Headed home from a vacation in England & Paris. Picked up some new books, of course. Starting off with this unusually-bound beauty from Mr. B's Emporium is Bookish Delights in Bath, England--amazing indie!