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

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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,
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,
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,
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: 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,
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 Mastriani — a 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,
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.”

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