If you’re just stopping by today, I’ve been going through a few books I picked up during the pandemic. You can check out an old post here or stay current on my Medium page.
Anyway, the next few surprised me – in some good, and not so good ways. 
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
It’s rare that I would read a non-fiction book about a topic other than business or human psychology. Basically I need to know how to run my business or deal with the people who impact it. But the surest way to surrender my own reasoned choice is not to get a good night’s sleep. So I thought there would be value in this book, and indeed there was. Up to a point.
This book was chock full of great information, and Walker is one of the country’s leading experts on sleep. But as the book wore on, his constant judgments and dispersions were just too much. Perhaps his copy editor did not get enough sleep on the day he had to tell Walker what to cut.
Tiffany Blues: A Novel by M. J. Rose
This was a surprisingly good book. This was a fictional account of two female artists who were selected to spend the summer as Tiffany fellows in the summer of 1924. While the story of Jenny Bell and Minx Deering is fictional, the Tiffany fellows program, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and his son, Oliver, are all indeed real.
When you read a lot of fiction in the same genre, you can often guess how a story will end halfway through. This one kept me guessing almost until the very end.
Dreamland by Nancy Bilyeau
When Fiona Davis called this book a “rollicking ride,” I assumed it would be one of my favorite books of the year. WRONG!
Dreamland is the story of one of America’s wealthiest families and the summer they spent on Coney Island.
Young Peggy, who thinks she’s not spoiled because she worked at a bookstore, falls foolishly in love with an immigrant artist who sells both paintings and hot dogs at Coney Island. Her sister is engaged to an ogre of a man who was originally after Peggy.
The male members of the Batternberg family are either sexually deviant, harboring secrets, or just mean. Strangely, the sexually deviant one has no bearing on the plotline or the ultimate resolution of the story. So why bother?
The characters were not only unlikeable, they were utterly unbelievable. At least it was free with Kindle Unlimited.
