Like I mentioned last week, I’ve signed up for back-to-back summer readathons for the last two weekends this month. The first is the 24 in 48 Readathon from 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, July 21, until 11:59 a.m. Sunday, July 22 (reading for 24 out of any of the 48 hours); the second, a reverse Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon, from 8 p.m. Friday night, July 27, until Saturday night, July 28, at 8 p.m.

I added one more book to the potential list for both readathons that I announced last week: Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue after seeing Tanya  of the blog mention it as her best book she’s read so far this year in her and her co-blogger Kim’s post The 2018 Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag [2018 Girlxoxo Edition]. The rest of the list (again) is as follows:

1. We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates
2. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
3. You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie
4. Bluebird, Bluebird: A Novel by Attica Locke
5. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
6. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
7. Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli.

In their post, Tanya also gave a shout-out to Children of Blood and Bone and I believe she is one of the bloggers I saw mentioning it that made me want to check it out.

As for what I’m reading before the two readathons or in between them, today I’m going to work on a recommendation from a patron at our library: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. I’ve had mixed success with her books. I think I liked Pigs in Heaven but I absolutely hated The Poisonwood Bible (sorry for all of you that loved it, but I just couldn’t get into it — at all). The patron mentioned he didn’t like that one either, but did like her first novel, so I thought maybe I won’t hate it and might actually like it. We’ll see. I also have the next Chief Inspector Armand Gamache book, The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny. Even though in the first two, we didn’t meet Gamache until a good 30 or 40 pages into the book, and I’m not usually a fan of multiple points of view, I really enjoy Penny’s writing.

Are you planning on participating in either or both readathons? Have you read either Louise Penny or Barbara Kingsolver? What do you think of their work, if you have? If no to the aforementioned questions, what are you reading this week?