Planes, Trains, and Running Shoes

Today, I'm linking up with Chelle for her new monthly Reading Lately link up! Click on over to say hi and join the fun!

I've always had a hard time figuring out the best way to post book reviews on my blog. For awhile, I would write a review every time I posted but those posts weren't really getting read, and I found that I wasn't reading those posts either, so last year, I decided on quarterly book reviews, however, that felt too infrequent, so I'm hoping that this monthly link-up will offer the sweet spot I need to share all my the books I'm reading!

"The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah - I had a really hard time getting into this book. I thought it moved really slowly and there was never a big plot twist. I struggled through it but I really wanted to keep reading, so I did. The ending blew me away. It was beautiful. It brought the whole story into perspective and I fell in love with it. I think I'll appreciate this more if I read it again but I do recommend this book. It truly was a wonderful story. Challenge Category: Historical fiction.



From Goodreads:

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime. 

"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows - I didn't think it was possible for a book about WWII to be funny, but I couldn't stop laughing through this book. Told at the end of WWII, this book follows author Juliet Ashton on her journey to finding a topic for her next book, which she finds after receiving a letter from an unknown man who has found her name in a copy of a book that he owns. Challenge Category: A book written by two authors.


From Goodreads:

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island. Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. 

"The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese" by Michael Paterniti - This is first nonfiction work of the year but it doesn't read like nonfiction, it reads like travel writing and I love it so far. I'm about halfway through the book, and at times, I forget that I'm actually reading nonfiction. Paterniti has a wonderful way with words that makes you feel like you're in the story right there, with him, eating cheese that is made out of love. Challenge Category: A book about food. (Maybe...this book is about so much more than just cheese!)

From Goodreads:

In the fall of 1991, while working at a gourmet deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Michael Paterniti encountered a piece of cheese. Not just any cheese. This was Paramo de Guzman, a rare Spanish queso reputed to be the finest, and most expensive, in the world. The cheese carried its own legend: Made from an ancient family recipe in the medieval Castilian village of Guzman (pop. 80), the cheese was submerged in olive oil and aged in a cave where it gained magical qualities-if you ate it, some said, you might recover long-lost memories. Too broke to actually buy the cheese, Paterniti made a quixotic vow: that he would meet this cheese again someday. Flash forward ten years, when Paterniti has finally found his way-family in tow-to that tiny hilltop village to meet the famous cheesemaker himself, a voluble, magnetic, heartbroken genius named Ambrosio. What Paterniti discovers in Guzman is nothing like the idyllic slow-food fable he has imagined. Instead, he wanders into-and eventually becomes deeply implicated in-the heart of an unfolding mystery, in which a village begins to spill its long-held secrets, and nothing is quite what it seems.