It’s Monday! What Are Your Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila of Book Journey. Be sure to check out her post today to see her selections and the list of links to all the other participating bloggers.

I gave up on The 3-Season Diet by John Douillard. It was simultaneously too outlandish and too difficult. I’m willing to try a few outlandish things if they don’t seem actually harmful, but not if they strike me as arbitrary and onerous.

The Fame Game by Michael Flocker is a self-help book masquerading as a humor book. It’s pretty fluffy, but I kept reading because I was fascinated by how much really good advice could be inserted into a book that strives to be a humorous look at popular culture. Turns out, it’s quite a lot — kind of a cross of Brand Yourself by David Andrusia and Rick Haskins, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and any number of books that help with goal setting.

I finished A Secret Affair by Mary Balogh, the fifth in the Huxtable quintet. A couple of weeks ago, Booking Through Thursday asked about our preference of series or standalones (Booking Through Thursday: Serial). A lot of bloggers who preferred series mentioned that it allowed them to get to know the characters so much better. That was a big part of the appeal of this book for me. I was half in love with the hero of this book, Constantine Huxtable, from the first book in the series. It was lovely to finally read his story as the last book of the series.

Just in time for our meeting last night, I finished Between Barack and a Hard Place by Tim Wise. And, then, we didn’t discuss it very much. Something happened in our group a few weeks ago that forced us to acknowledge a need to get out of our heads and do more emotional work. Tim Wise makes the intellectual case that the election of Barack Obama does not usher in a post-race America and may, in fact, make things worse if we aren’t vigilant. Our group didn’t take much convincing, so now we’re moving on to something else. We plan to do something that involves sharing our individual journeys in order to know each other better with the ultimate goal of building the trust required to then move forward.

My only current book is Doom with a View by Victoria Laurie, 7th in the Psychic Eye mystery series. It’s fun!

What’s next? Nutrition Map by Yvonne Quiñones Syto (my first ever review book!) and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford for the read along that Margo mentioned at Joyfully Retired.