Surprisingly, I’ve been keeping up with the reading part and not the blogging part. I usually fail in both buckets, so I really feel like this is an improvement on past performance. 🙂

March: “Slayed on the Slopes” by Kate Dyer-Seeley. Dyer-Seeley is a local author; the book came to me by way of work. As soon as I read the back cover I knew I had to read it right away, and that’s exactly what happened. “Slopes” is a quick, easy read, if  somewhat-predictable with its young twenty-something meddling heroine in a classic, outdoorsy whodunit. The book is second in a series that follows heroine Meg Reed, a young woman who has talked herself onto the masthead of a Portland-based outdoor magazine. The job is one she’s grossly unqualified for, but as any millennial worth her salt, she steps up the task and makes it work.  Anyway, it was a fun adventure, and a true throwback to the stuff I couldn’t get enough of  in my younger life, and Dyer-Seeley pretty much nails the self-deprecation and self-conscious actions and thoughts of a young woman at the beginning of her career.

April: April was the culmination of an undertaking that spanned nearly 10 months — I finally finished A Song of Ice and Fire. Ahhhhh. Book five, “A Dance with Dragons” was oh so good, and I’m very ready for book six, which of course doesn’t exist yet. I finished the book after the show restarted on HBO so for a couple weeks and I had both the television series and the book to satiate my appetite for the characters and story lines. Now that I’m done with the books, the show just isn’t enough. I NEED THE NEXT BOOK.

May: “The Night of the Gun,” by David Carr. This book was fantastic. You should read this book if:

If you read Carr in the NYT.
If you became intrigued with Carr in the NYT documentary “Page One.”
If you know of someone, or are someone, who has come back from addiction. Or is in the throes of it.
If you love narrative nonfiction.
If you are thinking about writing a biography or autobiography.
If you have any level of appreciation or curiosity for the investigative journalistic process.
If you have any belief in, or respect for, redemption, repentance, and second chances.

Basically, if you’re a person with any sort of soul, you should read this.

There’s this part in the second half of the book where Carr describes his relationship with his new partner Jill. When I read it at the time, it got me right in the gut and I burst into tears.

“Our partnership was romantic and practical, with the pants going back and forth between us as the situation required and shared appetite for adventure driving us around every bend, together. If marriage is about deciding to love on a daily basis, I have woken up to a no-brainer every day since.”

Gah. Even now. All the feels.

Annnnnd that brings me up to date. Thoreau’s “Walden” is still in process, though I took a bit of a break to get through Game of Thrones and I haven’t bounced back to it yet. This week I started Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” and I expect to finish it this month.