Total Luxury Reading Day--Another One Tomorrow?

Today I was lucky enough to have a pure reading day, unencumbered by chores and responsibilities. What a relief and a pleasure!  I did do laundry, while listening to an audiobook. I worked out on the treadmill, to an audiobook. And you know I could have encumbered myself with seasonal chores, but I chose not to. I'll have to start cooking Sunday, but until then I'm freeing myself. Enjoying hibernation!

It has been pouring rain since 7 pm last evening and we feel marooned by the "floodwaters." Actually, it's just 2.5 inches of rain rolling around on frozen dirt roads and snow-covered ground and frozen creeks. Yikes. Can we go out for dinner tonight? Like last night, the answer is a firm "No way."

So, what have I been reading?
I'm halfway through another delicious novel  of Christmas fiction, A Vineyard Christmas by Jean Stone, published this fall 2018. A woman writer, aged 40, has settled in a rented house on Chappaquiddick Island, a small island just to the east of Martha's Vineyard, which is a large island in Nantucket Sound off the southern coast of Massachusetts. "Chappy" is connected to Edgartown via a short ferry ride. Because MV has been the setting of several of her novels, Annie has decided to settle there permanently, and has dug in for the winter months. She knows very few people there, and has no family in her life, since her adoptive parents died some years ago.
As a blizzard bears down on the island just before Christmas, she discovers a three-month old baby in a basket on her doorstep. And therein the action takes off. 
Believe me, I'm not a big fan of books starring babies left on doorsteps, but this one has characterizations that are worth the time.  This one received good reviews, and I do recommend it. Well worth putting on your list for next year if you can't get to it this year. 

And for dynamite books with babies on doorsteps, I more than highly recommend the incomparable In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming, the first book in her mystery series, set in the foothills of the Adirondacks. The best book in the series, to my mind, although they are all so compulsively good. And because the last one was published in 2013, I think (sob!) the series is complete, although Spencer-Fleming's website does not give any indication of this.

Other reading today:
I'm so glad my brain has finally settled down enough so that I could thoroughly digest 55 pages of a biography, In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson, also published in 2018, the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Frankenstein, written when Mary Shelley was still a teenager.
One of the problems with being Mary Godwin Shelley's biographer is that there are precious few documents or records to form a comprehensive picture of her life, particularly of her juvenile years, which are the most informative to her writing of Frankenstein. 
However, much can be pieced together of her father's life (William Godwin) in the years after her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's death, just weeks after Mary's birth. I could wax on, but I'm so glad I'm reading this biography, in preparation for reading Frankenstein in January 2019, as part of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2019.

So, that's not all I read today--(Didn't I tell you I shrugged off everything!)
While doing laundry, was on the treadmill, and while  knitting I listened to a 2018 audiobook Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, a memoir by the daughter of Steve Jobs, the Apple founder.
Lisa was his first child. Her mother was involved with Jobs while he was in school and early in his career for a number of years, though they later parted.  Later, Jobs denied he was the father, although DNA tests confirmed he was. In a Time magazine cover article he declared that he was not the father and cast aspersions on Lisa's mother. However, the State of California later sued Jobs for the welfare money they paid out to Lisa's mother over many years and ordered him to pay for the care of his child.
The interesting thing about this book is it was awarded a "Best Book of 2018" status by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly and many other newspapers and journals. It's very interesting thus far, particularly because Brennan-Jobs has succinct memories from her very early childhood. As I mentioned, I've just started listening, so I'll have to wait to give my full conclusions.