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Renee - Itsbooktalk & More's avatar

What are your readerly dilemmas?

What have you been reading this week?

Hi all! So I have 2 readerly dilemmas I'd love your help with...

1. I want to get back into a regular mystery series and can't decide between three possibilities - the Louise Penny series (I've read STILL LIFE and very much enjoyed it), Agatha Christie - I've read and loved AND THEN THERE WERE NONE and watched the movie Murder on the Orient Express (also loved) and I've wanted to read Anthony Horowitz forever, specifically the series that starts with MAGPIE MURDERS - which one do you think I should start with??

2. Regarding my tbr - I have tbr's in many different places, I have my print to be read shelves at home, my kindle tbr, a few different written lists with a few hundred books listed, and my story graph tbr. I would love to put all of my books into one tbr, I usually don't care how long it is but now I'm wondering, should I go through all of those lists, remove what I no longer need and start just one centralized tbr? If so, I love a written list so I would happily keep a written tbr but I also need it to be digital for easy access so what would you suggest, notes app?

Recent Read- I just finished ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER by Elizabeth Gilbert. Whew. I have very complicated feelings about it. I listened and not sure I'd recommend that format because there's annoying music in between chapters and her poems....and there are a lot of both. Also, she uses the same words and phrases throughout - i.e. dude and babe- and it was like nails on a chalkboard for me. But she also brings heightened emotion to her story so there's that. I need a couple days to process this book. It was a lot- a lot of talk about addictions, codependency, cancer, God, but also so much time to be inside the mind of someone who "attempts" to lay on the table every single thought and feeling, destructive or otherwise. I listened to Oprah's interview with Gilbert and Oprah said the book was going to help a lot of people and truly I don't know if I agree with that. I'm going to review this but I need some time to think about what and how I say things. I might have to do an additional spoiler review behind the paywall to talk about more specific parts

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Carrie Palumbo's avatar

Fortunately my readerly dilemma is temporary - I'm finding it very hard to focus. Work is crushing me, I'm not sleeping well, and have two small children. By the time I sit down to read, I'm completely exhausted and end up rereading the same paragraph over and over. There's so much I'm interested in reading but I'm afraid to pick them up since I can't give it the proper attention.

It's easiest to read early in the morning before the house wakes up so I'm trying to maximize that time, if I wake up at 5 (or earlier 😭) and can't sleep, I jump out of bed and grab my book!

Despite my struggles, this week I started DISCONTENT by Beatriz Serrano and it's absolutely perfect!! Very much a right book/right time. It's about a 30-something year old woman, Marisa, who hates her corporate job and finds ways to waste time while appearing productive, this all starts falling apart when she is required to go on a team-building retreat. While I'm not quite on Marisa's level, there is so much I relate to, the humor and observations about the corporate world are *chefs kiss* perfection!

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