Dream Count

Hi bookworms, how’s it going? It’s been another quick week here with more windy, mild conditions. Our dog Willow has been out sunning herself with the pumpkins on the front stoop. She’s apparently protecting them, lol. It’s almost Halloween (already?!) and I realize I haven’t read any ghoulish kind of fiction this month. I usually like to pick up some kind of spooky thing. Though I did read the crime novel The Death of Us this month and watched The Lost Bus movie about the fire in California, both of which have some scary elements to them. But it’s not the same as a Shirley Jackson kind of tale or a movie or book that’s got haunted houses and ghosts causing havoc in the night. Have you read any this month? What would you recommend (either book or show)?

And I know it’s late October, but it’s better late than never to talk about a recap of my Summer reading Challenge. The ones pictured above were the 15 books I picked at the end of May that I hoped to get to. And I did finish them all except for one, which was Tim Winton’s novel Juice. That novel alluded me and it’s not easy to find, but I still plan to read it sometime. The rest were all quite good and I didn’t find any duds among the bunch. It’s hard to rate which ones I liked best or that stood out to me (most were four stars), but I’ve tried to list them below in some kind of order of which I thought were strongest. I’m still tinkering with the order.

• Audition by Katie Kitamura — it’s up for the Booker
• A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst — an unreal lost at sea true tale
• Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell — an Irish women’s abusive marriage and escape
• Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall — a love triangle gone wrong
• The Death of Us by Abigail Dean — a married couple’s struggles after a home invasion
• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — the lives of four African women who are at a crossroads
• Heartwood by Amity Gaige — an all out search for a lost hiker
• Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh — a hit-and-run accident upends a women’s life in Shanghai
• The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali — a lasting female friendship set during the political upheavals of Iran
• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid — the early days of female astronauts in the space program
• So Far Gone by Jess Walter — an older reclusive man journeys to protect his grandkids from a militant group
• Tilt by Emma Pattee — a pregnant woman’s journey across her city in the aftermath of a major earthquake
• The Last Secret Agent by Pippa LaTour — a female spy’s true tale of her days in Nazi Occupied France
• The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight — a woman at the University of Edinburgh tries to find out secrets about her parents

So there you have it. All in all, it was a pretty lively summer of reading with these books. And I pretty much liked them all. Did you read any of these?

And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Knopf / 416 pages / 2025

Synopsis: Each segment of the novel follows a different African woman who are all friends — Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor — as they come to crossroads in their lives and figure a path forward. Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer who recalls her past lovers and struggles with her choices and regrets. While Zikora is a lawyer in D.C. about to experience motherhood for the first time and upset that her partner has left. Whereas the outspoken Omelogor leaves a job of fraud in Nigeria to enter an MBA program in the States, only to find herself angered by her righteous classmates. And most disturbingly, Kadiatou is assaulted by a prominent man while at her hotel cleaning job and it blows into a public scandal.

My Thoughts: This was one of my last books on my summer reading list, lol. I thought there would be more interaction between the four women and it would be about their friendship, but no, the segments for the most part are pretty separate and it’s mostly about each of their lives and what they experience separately. It almost seemed like linked stories of the women, all of which have echoes of feminist themes.

I listened to it as an audiobook and the different narrators enlivened the story and the first half with the women Chiamaka, Zikora, and Kadiatou I was engaged with. But then the latter half with Omelogor and a final part with Chiamaka went a bit off the tracks for me. My mind wandered and it sort of exhausted me as it went on so much. So the early parts kept me interested and the other parts not as much. It seems I might have liked her 2013 novel Americanah a bit better, but I was glad to have finished this one too.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these and what did you think? How’s your reading been?