What book are you reading right now?
So many books on my shelf to read! I have books from many years ago that have been sitting on my shelf a lot longer than my recent additions to my TBR pile. Last year I would have a fiction and non-fiction book going at the same time so I could alternate reading each one when the mood struck. Now I’m book monogamous. However, I choose my next book by going back and forth in time. After I read a new one, I pick one that has been sitting for a long while.
With that said, my current book hasn’t been sitting as long as others have, but since it was published in 2017 and I bought it when it was new, it counts as “something old”.
It’s a book called Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. Yes, the actor Tom Hanks.
It’s a collection of short stories. What’s unique about it is that there is a typewriter in every story. I’ve only read three of the stories so far and the typewriter in each one, first of all, are various kinds and styles, but they are in the story in a variety of big and small ways. One story sees the main character scrolling a random history website and finding a fact about a U.S. president and something important he wrote on a typewriter. But that was just a blip in the overall story. Another one has a dad’s kids writing their letters to Santa on a typewriter in the 1950s.
I like this book because it’s easy to segment my reading time. One short story is easy to read in a single sitting. Once I finish it, I put the book down and do other things.
It’s all very interesting. Each story is definitely unique and each character has their own, distinct voice.
Like I said, I’m only through three stories so far, but I would honestly recommend this already. It’s interesting to see this other side of Tom Hanks. Being an actor probably helped him tell these stories well. In fact, the one set in the 1950s has a prominent war flash back in it which, given the war movies he has made, I’m sure it wasn’t difficult to conjure that part of the story.
I don’t know what I’ll read next. I do still like alternating fiction and nonfiction. Maybe I’ll pick a thick, fiction one next. A good story that I can get lost in. The book I read before this one was Jim Carrey’s book Memoirs & Misinformation, which, let me just say, was very, very strange and was more fiction based on some truth. It was about a fictional character named Jim Carrey and because I’m a super fan, I could identify characters and elements that are based on his real life, but it just was way out there in bizarre territory. It showed a lot of his fears and insecurities I think.
I have a lot on my shelf to get through. I’m trying to hold off on buying more books until I whittle this pile down. At one point I almost forgot what books I already had at home when I was at Barnes & Noble with my husband for our bi-weekly trip.
Enough rambling about random books. Maybe at the end of the year (next month!), I’ll do a post about all the books I’ve read this year. It’s not a huge number, but there were definitely some good ones in there.
Read on, friends…read on!
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