It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

The It's Monday! What are You Reading? meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Right, so I have decided to try a few challenges, I have created a list of things I am supposed to be reading and instead last night I finished reading Cinder by Marissa Meyer (400 pages) instead. Oops!  
 
I really liked the story. The cover I totally don't get - that shoe doesn't seem to have anything to do with the world described in the story and actively interfered with my ability to envision the world of the story. It is very eye-catching, but in many ways it is just wrong. And the ending - ARGH!  Sorry, I do in fact live under a rock, so I didn't realize that the book wasn't going to end so much as simply stop.  Yeah, yeah so now I have get book two and book three comes out next month, but if that book ends the same way it is going to be a long wait to book four in 2015.  Normally not something I would have picked up, but so many people spoke (wrote?) well of it that I decided to give it a chance. I am glad that I did. 
(My review is up now)

I blame this on the fact the Jewels is a 450+ page hardback and is really hard to read comfortably in bed, while Cinder was an ebook and I actually had no idea how long it was until I looked it up.    

This week I bought ... 

Contested Will by James Shapiro is not really about "Who wrote Shakespeare?" but more a discussion of the history of the argument and why different people have advanced different candidates like Bacon and the Earl of Oxford. I have absolutely no idea why I suddenly decided to get interested in this. I love Shakespeare's plays, have re-read several over the years but have pointedly avoided this whole argument because so many of the people involved are wildly over the top and also because I really can't figure out what difference it really makes. Unless Kit Marlowe really managed to write some of these plays after he was killed, I don't see what new information can be gleaned.

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor. I heard an interview with Sonia Sotomayor on NPR's Fresh Air and got interested in her autobiography. I really connected with the idea that she went to college lacking the same cultural experiences of her classmates.  I did too.  I also have long been alternately  fascinated and appalled by the workings of the Supreme Court. So this seemed like a book read.

Finally,  I don't even remember where I ran into a review of The Secret Rooms: A True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess, and a Family Secret by Catherine Bailey but it sounded right up my alley.  Here is the blurb from Amazon "After the Ninth Duke of Rutland, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, died alone in a cramped room in the servants’ quarters of Belvoir Castle on April 21, 1940, his son and heir ordered the room, which contained the Rutland family archives, sealed. Sixty years later, Catherine Bailey became the first historian given access. What she discovered was a mystery: The Duke had painstakingly erased three periods of his life from all family records—but why? As Bailey uncovers the answers, she also provides an intimate portrait of the very top of British society in the turbulent days leading up to World War I."  Sounds cool doesn't it !

I am still reading Jewels and The Golem and the Jinni. It would be lovely to finish something that I actually have on one of my lists.