When I left you last week, I was optimistic about reading political nonfiction, specifically the following:

• White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
• Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen
• Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
• What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race In America by Michael Eric Dyson
• When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matters Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Bandele, with a foreword by Angela Davis
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I mentioned that “after Trump’s election, I just wanted to crawl under a rock and not come out for (hopefully) the next four years as the world collapsed around all of us.” However, I said something had changed, even though I didn’t know what, and that it “way past time for me to catch up on what’s going on around us and I’m hoping these books will help me on that journey. ” I’m still hoping the books, most of which I now own, will help me on my journey, but after this past week, I am about back to go crawl under that rock. So for today anyway, I’m putting the political nonfiction on the back burner and this afternoon I’m going to try to escape in a fiction book.

At this point, I don’t know what I’ll be reading. Ironically, I picked up one book this week at the library that I thought would be a escape from politics but then when I actually looked at what it was about after I got it home, I discovered that it was political, even with Trump as a character. The book is The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man by Jonas Jonasson, with this description: “It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium, on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un …Soon Allan and Julius are at the centre of a complex diplomatic crisis involving world figures from the Swedish foreign minister to Angela Merkel and President Trump. Things are about to get very complicated …” I was with the description up until Kim Jong-un, then saw Angela Merkel and Trump mentioned, and then gave it a hard pass.

Also ironically for such a lover of fiction, I don’t have many fiction books on my Kindle right now or sadly at least, not many that I want to read. I do have one, Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first Amelia Peabody, by Elizabeth Peters that I might try this afternoon. We’ll see. I’ll let you know next week what I decided upon.

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Today, Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz has a post about The Sunday Salon and is seeking our input on the group, which for now is on Facebook but with limited participation. She is asking what the direction of the group will be. Check out her blog post or visit the Facebook group page.

How was your reading this past week? What do you have planned for this week?