What I'm Reading Now -- Be Ready When The Luck Happens

Ina Garten's new book, Be Ready When The Luck Happens, came recommended by both Mom and K. 

I spent several weeks on the library wait-list, before the book dropped into my library app.  I had requested both the ebook and audiobook options, and the audio arrived first. Lucky for me, I had a couple of flights the following day, which was a great time to put on some headphones and get started.  I like what I've heard so far, and I am looking forward to the rest of it!

What I Read -- What You Are Looking For Is In The Library

E's latest selection for our Postal Book Club is the ever-so-charming What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama.

This slim title is a collection of five short stories that are loosely connected in the way that the stories in Love Actually are connected: there is some slight overlap in the lives of some of the characters and they occasionally even play a role that changes someone else's trajectory, but their interactions are typically neither deep nor frequent. The same is true here: a character from a previous story may pop up later in a different story, or maybe someone doesn't pop up where you expect them to, but it keeps you thinking.

The stories are perhaps a bit overly cute, but they're hopeful and forward-looking in a way that feels very necessary right now.  It was an excellent and timely selection on E's part, and one I very much enjoyed reading!

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking -- Take 2

As I said, I had been meaning to read Quiet for a very long time.  When it first came out, I took one look at the title and thought, "yep, that's me!"  But, maybe because it seemed like I probably had internalized most of the messages of the book already, on my own, I just didn't make it a priority to read it.

I'm glad that I finally got around to it.  Though I think my instinct was correct that there was nothing truly shocking in this book to me (a lifelong introvert), she did rather concisely summarize several concepts that had been much more amorphously dancing around in my head.  And she had research and data to provide support her assertions.  You, too, can probably guess the general points; regardless, its contents will help you either understand yourself or others better, so give it a go!

I marked several passages that seemed like they might be useful reminders either for me or someone I know.  And it truth, this book probably has as many annotations now as any book I've read in recent years.

In the end, a thoroughly worthwhile exercise, and a fairly quick and entertaining read, to boot. 

And it marks the second of my 2026 Reading Challenge books ticked off the list!  I'm killing it this year (so far)!

What I'm Reading Now -- The Rivers Amazon

S and I were shopping for vintage books recently and he picked up one I didn't really expect.  It's called The Rivers Amazon.  It's an autobiographical retelling of the author's -- you guessed it -- journey through the Amazon in the 1970s, which of necessity incorporates information about the flora, fauna, geography, and peoples of the region.  I don't know much about the story beyond that. 

What the bookseller noted about the book was just that it was a small-run publication so near-mint hardcover copies of it are quite hard to find.  But now we have one, and it's up next in my march of books across the southern hemisphere.

Unfinished Books -- Overwhelmed and Stuck

There are a lot of books in the world.  I always try to remind myself of that when I'm reading a book that just isn't doing it for me.  It's hard, because not finishing something I've started feels like quitting.  I'll watch even a terrible show all the way to its final, lamentable episode.  But I am trying to be better, which is to say to be willing to give up on unimportant things, because life is short.

Two books I've decided I'm not going to finish are Overwhelmed and Stuck.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time turned out to be far too focused on motherhood to be useful to me.  There were a few good points about mental pollution (all that to-do-list stuff that takes up space in your brain), time confetti (those little bits of time, a few minutes here or there, which get wasted), and how much is lost because we are, these days, only able to dedicate about five minutes at a time to any given task.  

The author's disdain for the cultural shift where somehow speed and busyness became virtues also spoke to me.  The section on work had at least some non-kid-related thoughts, mostly about the myth of multitasking and how much of a typical worker's day is spent either being interrupted or trying to get back on track after an interruption.  But once I got to the sections on love and play, I was out. 

Remember how Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity mysteriously ended up in my library ebook app?  I started reading it, and it wasn't terrible.  I'm just stopping because it wasn't one I had picked for myself.  I have loads of other stuff to read. 

And, as I said, life is short. 

Happy Birthday, E!

The Emperor's Last Island and Skeleton Coast - Take 2

I had a love-hate relationship with The Emperor's Last Island. The "hate" portion began early in the book when the author tells us that, despite writing a whole book about Saint Helena, she's never been there.  That seems like a pretty basic part of the research - introductory, even - and I couldn't figure out why someone would so proudly put their shortcomings front and center.

There was enough "love," though, to get me to overlook that and keep going. And I'm glad I did, because the bits about Napoleon's life on Saint Helena were worth the read. I learned a lot of detail that would later come back to me during the audio tours we took at The Briars or Longwood House, but frankly it was more entertaining to discover them in the book.

Eventually, the author did come back around to her personal experience visiting Saint Helena. Again, first I started on the "hate" side of the spectrum, not wanting it to tum into an autobiography. But I have to give credit where it's due, and it's due here. Ms. Blackbum does a nice job of beginning the chapters with a vignette from her own travels, but working rather quickly back to Napoleon's story and sticking there for the remainder of the chapter.

This one gets good marks for being informative and educational, even if not thrilling.  It gets bonus points because it also fits the bill to be my March 2026 Reading Challenge book: a book with a possessive noun in the title.  So, yay!  Even further ahead of schedule than I was last week!

Skeleton Coast was brought the thrills.  It's the story of the wreck of the Dunedin Star off the coast of what was then South West Africa (now Namibia) during World War II. More than that, though, it's the story of all the people who braved the environment and elements on what might still be the world's most deserted stretch of unforgiving coastline to come to the aid of the stranded strip and its passengers.

The suspense, the will-they-or-won't-they of the rescue attempts, keeps the plot moving steadily forward, even if the travails of the overland convoy which gets stuck in the sand every 20 feet or so is somewhat repetitive. 

It's a quick, entertaining, and somewhat astonishing story of the willingness of so many people to risk their own lives to save complete strangers.

What I'm Reading Now -- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

My February 2026 Reading Challenge selection, and a book I've been meaning to read for years, is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. 

I am at least 95% introvert, according to every Myers-Briggs test I have ever taken.  I acutely feel the pressure, especially professionally, to behave like an outgoing, boisterous extrovert for far more hours in a day or week than I would care to. (And, lest there be any confusion, the number of hours in any given day or week that I would care to act that way is precisely zero.)

So, I'm interested to hear what Ms. Cain has to say to or about folks like me.  Hopefully I can learn some good tricks.

The Midnight Feast -- Take 2

My first venture into the Lucy Foley mystery canon turned out to be entertaining but a week later totally forgettable. 

The Midnight Feast is one of those stories in which some wronged individual comes back to their hometown 15 years later for a reckoning with the evil doer.  The tendrils of the story of course snake and curl and tangle around each other, and several of the characters are not the people they are pretending to be.  But isn't that what makes these stories work?  You always need that last-minute reveal in order for the pieces to all fall into place.  If not for that wild card, that person who needs to act in a way that their character up to the last thirty pages doesn't support, none of the wicked would be vanquished. 

A week on, I have to think hard to remember what happened.  But it was a quick and entertaining read while I was in it. 

What I'm Reading Now -- Skeleton Coast and The Emperor's Last Island

Continuing my literary march across the world's southern oceans, I've simultaneously picked up two books to poke through now that I'm finished with The Reader's Companion to South Africa.

First up is Skeleton Coast, by John Marsh.  It's the tale of a shipwreck and subsequent rescue off the coast of Namibia, also known as the Skeleton Coast for reasons which I think are at least partially obvious from the subject of the book.  (There are also a lot of whales that wash up dead along that shore, also inspiring its name.)

Skeleton Coast looks like a pretty short read.  It's not a great candidate to carry around with me, though, as it was published in 1954 and requires a bit of TLC when it comes to handling.

So for my walking-around book, I have the ebook version of The Emperor's Last Island.  Napoleon is famous for many things, among them that he was exiled from France not once, but twice.  The first time, he was cast out by the British after several notable failures in his Napoleonic Wars campaign and was sent to the island of Elba in 1814.  Somehow, despite being under heavy British guard, he escaped and returned to France. After being soundly defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was again exiled in 1815, this time to the distant and isolated island of St. Helena, located smack in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.  Napoleon died there in 1821.

The Emperor's Last Island, as best as I can tell, is a recounting based on what historical records exist of what those six years on St. Helena were like for the exiled Frenchman.