Six degrees of separation: Owls

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#6Degrees

Six degrees of separation:
Owls

This fun meme is hosted by
Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest
(see there the origin of the meme and how it works
– posted the first Saturday of every month)

Today, we are supposed to start from Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy.
I haven’t read it, but am definitely planning to, as I so  enjoyed an earlier book by her – see below.

six degrees May 2026

Click on the titles to access my reviews

Owls

I had to start with the other book I read by Charlotte McConaghy:

1. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
MY VERDICT: 
Both beautiful and heart-wrenching. And of course, a must for all birders.
 
Migrations focuses on arctic terns. So I went next with a book I just finished on another type of bird:
 
2. What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman
I haven’t found the time yet to review it, but this is the most fabulous book on owls!
 
And as I have read several books with the word owl in the title, I’ll go on with these:

3. The Owl, the Duck and – Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!, by John Cowper Powys
MY VERDICT:
A startlingly modern 1930 short-story. Funny, strange, and quietly profound. Yes, imagination and kindness can be more powerful than any official system.
 
4. Owls and Other Fantasies, by Mary Oliver
Beautiful poems on birds

 
5. The Secret Life of the Owl, by John Lewis-Stempel
MY VERDICT:
Everything you didn’t know about owls: their science, and their place in art and symbolism. Fascinating.

6. Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris
Part of my review:
In this book, you will travel all over the world, not only to France, but also to Australia, to China and Japan, etc. I really enjoy his style, his views always right on target, with love and humor, and the way he knows how to suddenly give a final twist you were not expecting at all.

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Visit other chains here

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HAVE YOU READ AND ENJOYED ANY OF THESE BOOKS?
ANY OTHER GOOD BOOK WITH OWL IN THE TITLE?
PLEASE LEAVE YOUR LINK IN A COMMENT

2026: April wrap-up

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APRIL 2026 WRAP-UP

Discovering that it didn’t save my latest version of this post.
After I wrote it, I actually managed to finish another book.
So here is my edited version:

I am not yet at the quantity of books I was reading at the beginning of the year, but almost there! I did manage to read what I had planned to read in April, and more!
I have also been back to art, which is a really good thing. This time zentangle on paper, instead of painting on rocks. It’s less messy, and I can do it at my desk. Slowly finding a balance between art and reading.

This month, I passed the number of 3,000 books reviewed on this site. And there are probably many that I forgot to list here, by alphabetical order of author.

📚 Here is what I read in April:

9 books 
5 in print 
with 845 pages, a daily average of 28 pages/day – quite pathetic
4 in audio
= 43H22, a daily average of 1H26 minutes/day

3 in scifi:

  1. Time Rider, by Tom DeLonge – audio
  2. Ni le jour ni l’heure, by Sylvain Forge
  3. Exo, by Colin Brush – audio

2 in mystery:

  1. A Grave Undertaking, by Lionel White
  2. Que la mort nous frôle, by Michel Bussi – audio

2 in literary fiction:

  1. Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis
  2. The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein

1 in poetry:

  1. Thirst, by Mary Oliver

1 in nonfiction:

  1. What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman – started in print, finished in audio

MY FAVORITE BOOKS THIS PAST MONTH

  What an Owl Knows Dom Casmurro The Giving Tree

READING CHALLENGES & OTHER RECAP

📚 Total of books read in 2026 = 38/150
(25%, 10 books behind for my Goodreads challenge)
📚 Classics Club 5th list: 71/100
(from December 2024-until November 2029)
📚 Japanese Literature Challenge 19: 5/5 books
+ x books outside the challenge dates
📚 Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge (#HYH26) (hosted by Neeru) = 0/4
📚 BookBound: 8 in 2024, 8 in 2025, 5 in 2026
📚 Number of books added to my TBR this past month = 12

Compared to my monthly goals: pretty good

  1. Compared to My April TBR = 7/7
  2. 1 book for my BookBound project  = 2
  3. From my TBR: 1 book in print
  4. a book in Spanish/Italian – alternate = in process
  5. From my TBR: the last one I ran into on a blog, etc
  6. From my TBR: from my jar or 1 I recently added to my TBR = 4
  7. From my TBR: 2 classics at least = 2
  8. 1 audiobook in French = 1

📚 In April,
– I traveled to: Brazil, France, Switzerland, US, and space
– 3 books published between 1899-1964
– I read 1 book in translation (from Portuguese)
– and 2 books in French
– 4 books came from my public library

📚 Special projects I did in April:

OTHER BOOKS  REVIEWED THIS PAST MONTH

   The Name of the Rose Call for the DeadThe Winter of our Discontent

MOST POPULAR BOOK REVIEW THIS PAST MONTH

Flight Behavior

 click on the cover to access my review

MOST POPULAR POST THIS PAST MONTH
– NON BOOK REVIEW –

Sunday Post #4
The bots are untameable,
but I hope you will discover great titles
through these older posts

BOOK BLOG THAT BROUGHT ME MOST TRAFFIC THIS PAST MONTH

Stuck in a Book
please click to go visit this blog, lots of good things there

TOP COMMENTERS 

Marianne at Let’s Read
Deb at Readerbuzz
Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy
please go and visit them,
they have great blogs

BLOG MILESTONES 

3,364 posts
over 5,270 followers
over 767,820 hits

📚 📚 📚

Come back tomorrow  to see
my reading plans and events for May!
How was YOUR month of April?

Sunday Post #159: two months later

 Sunday Post

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by
Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer.
It’s a chance to share news.
A post to recap the past week on your blog,
showcase books and things we have received.
Share news about what is coming up
on your blog
for the week ahead.
See rules here: Sunday Post Meme

*** 

This post also counts for

Sunday Salon     WWW Wednesdays 2

#SundayPost #SundaySalon
#WWWWednesday #WWWWednesdays

Click on the logos to join the memes

I was totally shocked when I realized my last Sunday Post was back in February!!
Since then, I have been running behind everything: reading, reviewing, reading emails, reding blogposts…
One thing that has changed is I have been back to doing art (zentangle) in the evening, and that has taken some of my reading time off.
So trying now to get a balance between both.

Here are my last posts:

    • Saturday 25: Book review: Exo, by Colin Brush
    • Monday 20: Book review: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.
      Concluding a long and major buddyread, with very long posts, but so fascinating
    • April 17: Book review: A Grave Undertaking, by Lionel White
    • April 15: Book review: Call for the Dead, by John Le Carré
    • April 14: Book review: The Winter of Our Discontent, by John Steinbeck
      = three very satisfying books reads for The 1961 Club

📚 JUST READ / LISTENED TO 🎧 

A Grave Undertaking📚 A Grave Undertaking,
by Lionel White
Mystery
1961
160 pages
Counts for my Classics Club 5th list

MY VERDICT:
Slick, funny, and fiendishly plotted — Lionel White’s classic caper reads like a film in novel form.

I had never read any book by this Lionel White, and A Grave Undertaking was a delightful discovery.
The novel opens with the death of an unknown person, and the mystery surrounding his identity. But the novel quickly changes direction when the corpse becomes an essential prop in the plan to rob a bank.
Quite the smart idea from this group of criminals.

Click on the cover to read my full review

Exo🎧 Exo,
by Colin Brush
Narrated by Gildart Jackson
scifi
2025
354 pages / 13H50
Received through libro.fm

MY VERDICT:
A dying Earth, a mysterious entity consuming the oceans, a murder mystery, and some mind-bending science: fascinating premise, but uneven and confusing delivery, especially in audiobook format.

Click on the cover to access my full review

📚READING / LISTENING  TO 🎧 

Just a couple of the many titles I’m currently reading/listening:

Thirst📚 Thirst,
by Mary Oliver
Nonfiction / Poetry
2006
88 pages

I already read it in 2011, and back then only gave it 3 stars.
I really wonder why!
I am glad I decided to reread it for my Mary Oliver project.
This is such a beautfiul collection, the first one explicitly Christian. And of course at the same time focused on nature.

What an Owl Knows

🎧 What an Owl Knows: The New Science
of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds,
by Jennifer Ackerman
Narrated by Jennifer Ackerman
Nonfiction / Birds
2023
333 pages / 9H14
Counts for my BookBound project

I had started reading it, and when I saw it was available through my library in audio, narrated by the author, I switched formats.
I’m glad I did, as the author is great at conveying her passion, and sometimes humor.
This is such a fabulous book!
All you want to know on owls, their characteristics, their behavior, and also their place in various cultures around the world.
With lots of new data we have recently learned on them thanks to modern technology.
I keep talking about this book!

📚  BOOK UP NEXT 🎧

The Blind Woman of Sorrento

 📚 The Blind Woman of Sorrento,
by Francesco Mastriani
Literary fiction
La cieca di Sorrento was first published in 1852
Translated from the Italian
by Idara Crespi
March 16, 2026 by Espresso Publishing House 
347 pages
Counts for my Classics Club 5th list
Received for review by the translator/editor

I just received this offer yesterday, and am totally thrilled about it.
As this is the first book of Espresso Publishing House, I’m pasting here Idara’s words:

“My name is Idara Crespi. I founded Espresso Publishing House because I kept finding extraordinary novels — in Italian, French, Spanish — that had never been properly translated, or whose only English editions were stiff Victorian reprints that no one reads anymore. These are books that deserve to be read. My job is to make that possible.

My first translation is The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La Cieca di Sorrento), by the Neapolitan novelist Francesco Mastriania Gothic masterwork of Italian Romanticism, first published in 1852, now available in its first modern English literary translation.
It is, in my view, one of the great overlooked novels of the nineteenth century: labyrinthine, atmospheric, deeply human, set in a Naples that no longer exists. I translated it because it was extraordinary and because no one else had.

More translations are in progress. Each one is a book I found and could not stop thinking about.

Espresso Publishing House editions are distinguished by fresh literary translations, scholarly introductions, and careful design. They are books worth keeping.”

📚  THE LINK OF THE WEEK 📚

David Malouf just passed away.
You might want to revisit my review of Remembering Babylon.

🎧  THE MUSIC OF THE WEEK  🎧 

Thanks to a student, I just discovered
the best current French pianist,
Alexandre Kantorow,
playing a piece by a composer I hadn’t heard before either: Alkan

📚  LAST BOOK ADDED TO MY GOODREADS TBR 📚 

The Language of Liars

📚 The Language of Liars,
by S. L. Huang

Scifi novella
April 21, 2026 by Tordotcom
176 pages

I was sold by Tammy’s review.
Her verdict:
“A high stakes, emotional tale that explores language and communication between species, The Language of Liars is both thrilling and heart-wrenching.”

The theme of language and communication in scifi is somethng I enjoy a lot.

Speak another people’s language. Know them. Become them.
And discover you’ve destroyed them.
In his training as a spy, Ro was warned: you will always be living a lie.
Jumping into a Star Eater’s mind in the first place requires a moment of perfect psychic connection, and he has studied all his life to comprehend their species. Admires them, respects them, is reverent at the idea of being one of them—the only species physiologically capable of mining the element needed for lightyear-spanning space travel. The species all others crave to know more of, but who have notoriously shared so very little. The species Ro’s own small civilization, with its dwindling resources and withering reach, needs to know more about.
It will feel real, his elders impressed upon him. It will never be real.
But Ro’s certainty runs deep: he will be different. Ro will not be an imposter hiding the truth of his past, because his heart will be one of them. He will be one of them.
To understand is to become. It never occurs to him that the mere act of understanding can destroy.”

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HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THESE BOOKS?
HOW WAS YOUR WEEK?
BE SURE TO LEAVE THE LINK TO YOUR POST