Stories & Shout Outs #29

I should be writing one of the five outstanding book responses I have building up next to my computer. Instead, I decided to tidy up the stack of books spreading around my chair, in preparation for this weekend's Dewey's Readathon.

What will I be reading?
With so many choices, I may need your help to decide?
Have you read any of these books? Or do you plan to?

New(ish) to the Pile:

• Three Apples Fell From the Sky | Narine Abgaryan
• Truganini | Cassandra Pybus
• She I Dare Not Name | Donna Ward
• The Inland Sea | Madeleine Watts
• The Dickens Boy | Tom Keneally
• The Weekend | Charlotte Wood
• The World in the Whale | Rebecca Giggs
• The Book of Longings | Sue Monk Kidd
• The Loudness of Unsaid Things | Hilde Hinton

ARC's in the Pile:

• On the Line: Notes From a Factory | Joseph Ponthus | translator Stephanie Smee
• Black Inc | July release
• In this celebrated French bestseller, translated by Stephanie Smee, Ponthus captures the mundane, the beautiful and the strange, writing with an elegance and humour that sit in poignant contrast with the blood and sweat of the factory floor. On the Line (À la ligne) is a poet’s ode to manual labour, and to the human spirit that makes it bearable.

• A Room Made of Leaves | Kate Grenville
• Text Publishing | July release
• What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

• The Vanishing Half | Brit Bennett
• Dialogue Books - PRH Australia | June release
• a powerful new novel about the parallel lives of estranged twin sisters who choose to live in two very different worlds - one black and one white....Looking well beyond issues of race, THE VANISHING HALF considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

• The Things She Owned | Katherine Tamiko Arguile
• Affirm Press | 28 April release
• Years after the death of her cruel and complicated mother, Erika is still surrounded by the things she left behind: an onigiri basket, a Wedgwood tea set, a knotted ring from Okinawa. Against her Japanese family’s wishes, Erika has also kept the urn containing her mother’s ashes and bones, refusing to put Michiko’s memory to rest....Beautiful and mysterious, The Things She Owned explores the complexity of lives lived between cultures, the weight of crossgenerational trauma, and a mother and daughter on a tortuous path to forgiveness.

• The Paris Library | Janet Skeslien Charles
• Two Roads - Hachette Australia | June release
Based on the true World War II story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris, this is an unforgettable story of romance, friendship, family, and the power of literature to bring us together....A powerful novel that explores the consequences of our choices and the relationships that make us who we are—family, friends, and favourite authors—The Paris Library shows that extraordinary heroism can sometimes be found in the quietest of places.

• The Jane Austen Society | Natalie Jenner
• Orion - Hachette Australia | May release
It's only a few months since the war ended but the little village of Chawton is about to be hit by another devastating blow. The heart of the community, the Chawton estate, and site of Jane Austen's cherished former home, is in danger of being sold to the highest bidder.
Eight villagers are brought together by their love for the famous author's novels, to create THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY. As new friendships form and the pain of the past begins to heal, surely they can find a way to preserve Austen's legacy before it is too late?

• Latitudes of Longing | Shubhangi Swarup 
• Riverrun Books - Hachette Australia | May release
• A sweeping, lyrical debut about the love and longing between humanity and the earth itself.... The novel sweeps across India, from an island, to a valley, a city, and a snow desert, to tell a love story of epic proportions. We follow a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who speaks to them; a geologist working to end futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a mother struggling to free her revolutionary son; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who transforms first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents. Binding them all together is a vision of life as vast as the universe itself.

What I'm Reading Right Now:

• Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line | Deepa Anappara
• War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy
• The Conquest of the Plassans | Emile Zola

Read But Not Reviewed (Yet):

• Cherry Beach | Laura McPhee-Browne
• Redhead by the Side of the Road | Anne Tyler
• Some Tame Gazelle | Barbara Pym
• 488 Rules for Life | Kitty Flanagan
• Talking to My Daughter About the Economy | Yanis Varoufakis

On My Radar:

• Thanks to being back at work this past couple of weeks, I've gone back to the age-old issues of not enough time and weariness at the end of each day, that keeps me from getting around to visit other blogs. So I have very little knowledge of what's going on out there at the moment.
• Please alert me to any upcoming readalongs you think I might be interested in.
• Dewey's Readathon this weekend is one of those events I've tried not to miss for about 8 or 9 years now. Even on those days I can only read for part of it, I still love the focus on reading and the community who gathers around for it. Sadly, this is the last time we will have Andi & Heather at the helm. I believe a BIG announcement about a new host will be made over the weekend.

Until then, TGIF!