It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? Is hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date, a great place to meet up and share your reading plans for the week. I love finding new blogs and new books – so a link-up that helps me do both? Sign me up!

The first week of February was not my favorite. Work is busier than usual and so is everything at home, meaning less reading and more chores (when we can fit them in). I’m definitely not a read-to-relax kind of person, but still, I managed to find a few escapes during the week, starting with the audio version of Stars Above by Marissa Meyer. The Lunar Chronicles will always be a favorite audio series, and the final collection of stories is no exception! Complete with a long awaited wedding and surprising proposal! Next up, I finally got my hands on a copy of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin – a fast paced novella following a woman in the midst of a fever-dream spurred by an unknown ailment. All the while she’s trying to backtrack, to finally place the moment it all went wrong, when she lost trace of her daughter. An emotional high from the get-go with an even more heart wrenching ending, it was the perfect read to end my week!

Luckily, my week ended happily, all thanks to a special meet and greet hosted by Houston’s own Blue Willow Bookshop. I got to meet the very charming Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow!! Easily one of my favorite reads from 2016, the signing was even more amazing than expected. He started the event by sharing his inspiration for the book, stemmed by all his travels as a financer, and giving a mini history lesson on the Metropol Hotel. Did you know Nina and Sophia are loosely based on his daughter? A young spit-fire herself, she’ll be the first one to correct her being referred to as “the baby”. A delightful speaker, and even more esteemed author, I can’t wait to see what he writes next! A hint: it involves three teens traveling from the Midwest to New York City.

Currently, I’m reading The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld following a young refugee who’s traveled from Eastern Europe to Israel in hopes of finding his family and to make a new home for himself. Throughout the story, he struggles to accept the changes in his life, finding a new language and a new country more overbearing than a grieving teen can bear. I’m also listening to Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum. So far so good – the story is definitely different from anything I’ve read lately. Following a woman trying to find her place in a new country with her newly formed family, a new string of affairs threatens to change the tides beyond repair. Intimate and intense, I’m intrigued to see how this one ends.

What are you reading?