Read then Write - 23/7/26

Well this might be a short post as, although the last one of these posts was done on 11th June, (yes 6 weeks ago!) I have only managed to read 2 books during that time.   Yes I know, that is most unlike me.  Of course we were on holiday and then we came home to a houseful of family so I really didn't have it in me to do much reading.

But, I finally finished this one earlier this week:

It was a book club read and several people rated it highly.

I'm on the fence.  

I can understand why people rave about it. It follows the lives of two young Nigerians, Ifemelu and Obinze as they navigate life in America (for Ifemelu) and the UK (for Obinze) there is a lot about race and immigration, written from a black perspective. Both subsequently return to Nigeria where much has changed.

It is a really good book but for me it was just too long and it took a long time for me to get hooked enough to read it consistently. I hadn't even finished it when the book club met to discuss it. It's also quoted as being funny but I failed to find much humour in it.

Another complaint we had was that the edition we had from the library was very small print. The page number was 477. I noted another edition as having 588 pages. That probably had an average sized print and confirmed my suspicions that this is a very long book!

This one was a much easier read and I finished it in two days:

Our evening book group will be discussing it next week.  I really enjoyed it but I do think it's been overhyped.  

These are the next two book club reads:

I've actually read Lessons in Chemistry and loved it so that will be an easy re-read for me.  The Atwood one is a collection of short stories and is less than 300 pages so hopefully that one won't be too difficult to get through.  It will also tick one of the 52 Book club prompts - "starts with an O" so that will help get me back on track with that challenge.  I have some catching up to do!

Have you read much over the summer so far?