Sunday Brunch #TBR Roundup

Welcome to the Sunday Brunch #TBR Roundup. While you sip your Sunday morning coffee, you can see what we’ve added to our “To Be Read” lists in the past two weeks (Sun 10 Apr – Sat 23 Apr). Discover all of the various places we get our reading recommendations. Have you read any of these? What did you think of them? What have you added to your #TBR list recently?

Bekky

Julian Fellowes’s Belgravia (Episodes, Novel) by Julian Fellowes
Creator of Downton Abbey + Regency Era England = Love. I heard through NPR Books that Julian Fellowes, the creator and mastermind behind the beloved British show, was writing a series installment novel called Belgravia. I raced to Goodreads to add it to my list since it doesn’t come out for a while.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
Fat studies and the fat acceptance movement is a passion of mine and finding quality fiction that tackles the perspective of fat women are hard to come by in the mainstream. I came across this title on Twitter.

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
“A Gothic retelling of Jane Eyre.”—That’s it…I’m hooked. Jane Eyre is my favorite book so naturally I added this to my TBR list.

Joli

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander
I was immediately drawn to this memoir when I read the Goodreads blurb for a couple reasons. First, because it describes her writing as “channeling her poetic sensibilities into rich, lurid prose.” Doesn’t that sound beautiful? Also, this is a book about her “quest for meaning and acceptance in the face of loss” when she suddenly loses her husband. Having suddenly lost my mom in 2014, I think I”m really going to connect with this one.

Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble
I picked this one out of the list of Pulitzer Prize finalists. I’m a sucker for stories about the early American West for some reason…I guess it’s the romanticism of it all. I also loved the description of the main character – “headstrong, earthy, and magnetic heroine.”

The Wander Society by Keri Smith 
After seeing a beautiful shot of this book on Instagram by Kath_Reads, I found it on Goodreads and got really excited about reading it! How awesome does this sound??
“Several years ago when Keri Smith, bestselling author of Wreck This Journal, discovered cryptic handwritten notations in a worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, her interest was piqued. Little did she know at the time that those simple markings would become the basis of a years-long, life-changing exploration into a mysterious group known only as The Wander Society, as well as the subject of this book.”

Mel

The Translation of Love by Kutsukake, Lynne
I may never have heard of this book if I hadn’t received it in the Chatterbox that I won. I actually just finished reading it, too, and it enjoyed it a lot. It reminded me a little of another book I read this year, A Tale for the Time Being, because they are both set in Japan (albeit different eras) with one of the main characters being an adolescent girl.

Rivers Running Free: A Century of Women’s Canoeing Adventures by Niemi & Wieser
My roommate was reading a book of women’s canoe adventure stories, and I was intrigued. It was called Rivers Running Free: Stories of Adventurous Women published in 1987. The one I added to my list is merely an updated edition from 1997. If you can’t tell I’m into strong outdoor women right now.

What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young
I had heard of this book somewhere else recently, but yesterday I attended a presentation by Jonathan Poppele about Bird Language and he was selling this book by his teacher Jon Young. I’ve been trying to observe and learn more about birds over the past year or two, so I’m excited to read this book. This is one I plan to bring to the forest with me this summer.

Whit

I picked up two new books at Goodwill, both of which I have been meaning to read:

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Both of these were picked up because I had heard/read excellent reviews of them previously, and I make it a mission to sift through the hundreds of copies of Da Vinci Codes and 50 Shades of Grey on the thrift store bookshelves to find TBR gems like these.

In addition, I have a craving for the writing of Haruki Murakami, so After Dark is on my list. I know my review of 1Q84 was middling, but there is no denying that the way Murakami writes is intoxicating for a lover of beautiful prose, and I have high hopes for this novel.