Sunday Salon - musing about books

The Sunday Salon.com

Good morning Sunday Saloners from sunny California. Memorial Day weekend usually blasts us with 100 degree weather and today it is a cool 59 degrees. When I got up this morning, I put on shorts and ended up wearing my sweater for most of the morning. I love three day weekends. Plenty of time to catch up on household chores, snooze and of course read.

Yesterday we spent part of the day waiting for the AT&T U-verse installer to show up. The first time they came out, there had been a problem at the home office and they hadn't hooked something up or whatever, so he couldn't do the job. Yesterday, when the installer didn't show up, I called and found out the wonderful people screwed up and didn't put the appointment in their computer. You want to know how I feel about incompetence! If they can't even manage to get that right, what kind of service would we get once everything was hooked up and changed. Part of the reason I canceled our cell phone service through them - poor customer service. I unfortunately shot the messenger, (verbally, not literally) letting her know how I feel about the incompetence of the company and no, I didn't want to reschedule even if you are offering more money off and canceled the whole thing. Grrrr!

So I buried my nose in reading. Surprisingly, since I always say I can't handle reading more that one book at a time, because can't keep them all straight, am reading four different books right now. (Sorry, my internal editor has taken a hike) Finally started reading "French Bred," the laughable chronicles of an average Parisian Boy by Frederic Guarino. He sent the e-book ages ago to read and since I have a hard time reading e-books, ended up printing it out to read. Father laughed and gave me a hard time about printing it out and asked me what I was going to do with it when I was done. Haven't the slightest idea at this point. Any ideas? Enjoying the story so far.




Friday, we went to Borders and added 5 more books to my TBR Pile. I picked up "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, which started reading last night. Quite interesting, very enlightening and discovered I've intuitively been doing some of the things he suggests. When started the book wasn't feeling so positive that I could actually write a breakout novel. By the time I got to chapter 5, was feeling more positive, thinking "hey, I can do this. I am doing this." I can already see, this is one book will be reading again and again.

Picked up "Eat, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" by Lynne Truss as well. I forget which blogger recommended this book, but as soon as read the review, had to have it. Also bought "Boneman's Daughter" by one of my favorite authors - Ted Dekker. "Kill for Me", book # 3 in the Daniel Vartanian series by Karen Rose. I just couldn't wait another month for the paperback to come out. Plus my first George R.R. Martin "A Game of Thrones" which is book 1 in the Song of Fire and Ice series.

Also have my nose in Kate Carlisle's debut novel, a new bibliophile mystery series "Homicide in Hardcover," which just came out in February. She is currently working on book # 2. Enjoying it so far.

And yesterday read "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad for my Modern Fiction class. I had already read the book last year for film and lit class, but this book is the Norton Critical Edition with background and criticism essays which are really, really interesting. So much more detail and better written. The other edition just seemed flat. Maybe it's because I'm reading it again and picking up more detail the 2nd time around.

Oh and I received from Thomas Nelson for the book blogger review program "Nelson's Illustrated Guide to Religions," a comprehensive introduction to the religions of the world by James A. Beverly. It looks pretty interesting from what I've seen so far and part of the reason I decided to read it, is because Dr. Beverly specializes in world and new religions, charismatic Christianity, Roman Catholic theology and christian ethics. It doesn't look like one of the those that tries to debunk all the religions in favor of one. Will take me a while to read through this one.

In regard to challenges - there is one more month left for the Spring Reading Thing and Once Upon a Time challenge. I've finished 14 out of 25 books for SRT and 7 out of 14 for on my list for OUAT. Will I finish all the books on my lists? We'll see. I've managed to finish 67 books so far this year, so definitely going to surpass the J.Kaye's 100+ challenge.


Thirst for Knowledge by Josephine Wall

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6 comments:

  1. I'm not so happy with AT&T myself. I long for the good old days of excellent customer service. Where have they gone?

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  2. What a nice treat - all those new books. Doesn't it just feel so good? This picture is so fascinating. I've just been staring at it.

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  3. I haven't read any of Ted Dekker's books yet but The Boneman's Daughter sounds lie it has a really interesting premise.

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  4. Sounds like you've got some great books there. You've made me want to check out the Maas book. Happy Memorial Day!

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  5. You have seriously been busy this weekend and with all that great book reading going on too!!! I LOVE George R.R. Martin...this series is awesome, long but awesome!!

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  6. You got soem really good books. BoneMan's Daughters was awesome and Dekker is also one of my favorite authors. I also like East, Shoots and Leaves a lot, it's actually quite funny and the whole anecdote about the title was what made me buy it.

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