The Master Butcher's Singing Club - Louise Erdrich

This author is someone I've been wanting to read for a while, so I was happy to get this book from the Library Sales shelves a while back. I liked this book, but I wish I had liked it a little more. On the one hand, the time period in which it's set, the actual setting, and the characters were all very appealing to me and I liked them a lot. On the other hand, I feel like the story meandered around a bit for my tastes, there's a couple love stories that are a little random and not set up as much as maybe they could have been, and the titular singing club isn't featured in the book as much as it maybe could have been. But all that said, I did like the book and it kept me reading. This author has some other books that look really good, so I hope to clear my TBR pile and get to them sooner rather than later. All in all, recommended.

Buying on Time - Antanas Sileika

This book encapsulates my love for the Library Sales shelves - you can run across some really interesting books that you might otherwise have never heard of. Readers, I LOVED this book. It's a series of short stories, but they are all about the same characters, so it's the best of all possible worlds for short stories as far as I am concerned - I get to spend a lot of time with characters and situations that I really enjoy, without the constraints of a novel-length plot, etc. Everything about this book was awesome - the beautiful, clear writing; the fully developed characters; the time period. With a bonus of also being a book about the immigration experience. I cannot wait to read this author's other works, so I really need to clear up my TBR pile ASAP. Highly Recommended.

I am going to claim this book in the "red" category of the Color-Coded Reading Challenge as the cover is mostly red, as shown below. I couldn't get a good image of the entire cover and I didn't want to break the spine of my copy, but check out the neat cover design.

The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Readers, I have mixed feelings about this book. To be honest, it was relentlessly joyless and sometimes even brutal. I also feel like the same story could easily have been told in half the page count and the book would have lost nothing but some repetitive language. The setting(s) were interesting; I enjoyed learning more about India's past and politics, and I like reading about immigration experiences, as I often wonder what it would be like to move to a foreign country and adapt and etc. But all in all, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this book.