LINK-UP | IT’S MONDAY! WHAT ARE YOU READING?

It has been a week! My kid just started a new school last week and it’s very different for all of us (in no small part due to getting up earlier than we had to all summer!), so I haven’t gotten as much reading done as I have been. That said, the books I finished were excellent!

Just Shelved

     

I didn’t start off the week even planning to read How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, but then I got it through Netgalley… and I consumed the entire thing in a day! It was so, so good. The main character, Cara Romero, is newly unemployed and going to a counsellor who is supposed to help her find work. Instead Cara uses the twelve sessions to tell the counsellor her life story. The result is intimate, funny, tragic, enlightening and (at times) infuriating. She’s a complex and deeply flawed character, but I couldn’t help but be completely drawn in to her life story, and I ended up caring deeply about her by the end of the book. You can read my full review here. It’s All Absolutely Fine is a graphic novel, I guess? It’s a mixture of cartoons and prose, and it deals with Ruby Elliot’s (better known as Rubyetc) mental health struggles – what it’s like to live with them, what they feel like, how they manifest, debunking some myths surrounding them and setting the reader straight on what an ongoing process it is to manage them. It’s one that made me laugh, made me cry, and made me feel seen. Highly recommended, but be aware that it’s not the easiest read and could definitely be triggering.

Currently Reading

               

I’ve made some progress on Lonely Castle in the Mirror, and I think I’ve reached the point where I’m finally invested. It’s a bit of a slow burn at first, but it’s so interesting and emotionally resonant, and I wish I could just sit and read it all day! I haven’t made much progress on What White People Can Do Next this week because any time I’ve had for reading print I’ve used for Lonely Castle. But what I’ve read so far is great, and I hope to get back to it next week. (I’m also experimenting with annotating, and perhaps went a little too far into that, so it’s reeeeeeeally slow progress when I’m stopping to take several notes and highlight things every page or two!) I got The Myth of Normal and Unsettled Minds through Netgalley. The former I’m about halfway through – it’s quite a long book (another reason I finished less this week – if this had been shorter I’d be done by now) and it’s really thought-provoking so far. A lot of it is bringing up some memories and feelings for me, so it’s definitely having an impact. Strangers to Ourselves I went into without much context, I just saw it had to do with mental health. It’s a series of stories of different patients who have different mental health challenges, live in different time periods and in different locations. Some of it is really interesting, but some of it I’m finding a bit harder to feel enthused by. I can’t say exactly why, I guess something to do with the style of writing feels less punchy and immediate and more studied and researched. Which makes sense as she’s writing other people’s stories, I just don’t feel as pulled in as I had hoped. But still a really interesting read if you want to learn about how mental health issues were dealt with in the 20th century or how they are dealt with in different places.

Up Next

               

Same as last week, almost! The only change is that I got a copy of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki from Netgally, so that’s been added to my TBR and I’ll be reading that as soon as I finish the other two I’m reading from Netgalley now. The others I’ve either got on my shelf and can’t wait to read or have out of the library. So hopefully I’ll get to one or two of these in the next week!

What about you guys? What did you read this week? Have you read any of these books, and if so what did you think (without spoilers)?

A weekly post that encourages bloggers to share what they have read in the past week, what they’re currently reading and books they’ve recently added to their TBRs. Originally started by Sheila at Book Journey, it is now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date.