Holiday Reads - Picoult, McInerney, Bryson & Silver

As I was limited to hand luggage on my recent trip to Mallorca, I only brought two physical books but also packed my tablet to download books from the library.

Here's an outline of the books that I read.

I started with "Small Great Things" by Jodi Picoult. This is not a challenging read although it deals with the challenging subject of racism and prejudice in modern day America. I found the book to be very interesting and well written - I always enjoy reading anything by Picoult and have no hesitation in recommending this read.

The next books I read were downloaded eReads. I had brought "The Sellout" by Paul Beatty but it just didn't hook me after reading a few pages so I left it to the side.

Here's all of the books that I downloaded on my Amazon Fire:

 "Hot Pants in Hollywood" by Susan Silver was a perfectly fine holiday read. Nothing to write home about but perfectly readable. It is a biography with stories by Silver of her time as a writer in Hollywood, writing for such shows as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". I found it interesting to read about what it was a like as a "woman writer" in this era and it has echos of Helen Gurley Brown's "Sex and the Single Girl".

Monica McInerney is an Irish Australian author who writes (in my opinion) somewhat similarly to Maeve Binchy in a sweet sentimental way about Ireland and Australia. I really enjoy reading her books since I first read "The Alphabet Sisters" on a beach in Sydney, Australia nearly 20 years ago - it had me in tears.

Bill Bryson is my "go to" for a bit of humour. I read this book before but it was good to go back to it again on this trip. This is his book about his return to the USA after 20 years in Britain so there is lots of contrasting between the two countries in Bryson's hilariously funny way.

I read "Spies in the family" on the plane home. It was lucky that I downloaded a book to read as we were delayed for a few hours with a tech issue being discovered as we went to take off. After engineers fixed the problem we had another aborted takeoff before being taken off this plane and moved to another one. Mallorca is only 2.5 hours from Ireland so all of the issues with the plane doubled our travel and then some.  
Thank goodness for free eBooks from the library!!

For info:
I read eBooks on my Amazon Fire. As it is a tablet and not an eReader it is not easy to read in the sun as it does not have a "paper screen" like an eReader. However, I was given a tip by a friend to switch the screen to black with white writing. It worked perfectly and I was able to read in the sun with no issues!

And in case you are wondering, children's eBooks are also generally available for free from your library with graphic novels and cartoons too!