Skip to main content

The Sunday Salon


What a crazy week this has been! My cousin, who’s ten, was in town for most of this past week, and since he’s high energy, it’s taken a lot of energy especially out of my mom, who also had to deal with my 87-year-old grandmother. Plus. my sister was in town for the weekend, so it’s been mostly crazy around here. All of my posts this past week have been scheduled; and I only got around to writing a bunch of outstanding reviews yesterday afternoon.

It’s quieter here now that my mom has driven my sister back to New York, and I’ve spent much of today catching up on sleep and, of course, reading. Right now I’m reading one of my Virago Modern Classics: The Rising Tide, by Molly Keane (though it was originally published under her pseudonym MJ Farrell). I’m really loving it; the author really knew how to combine wonderful (sometimes exasperating) characters with a great plot. I’ve been cruising Ebay for more books by Molly Keane, since I’m living her writing style. This is easily one of the best books I’ve read this month.

Also read this week were Elizabeth Chadwick’s To Defy a King (didn’t love it as much as I thought I would, but it’s good nonetheless) Laura Joh Rowland’s Shinju (mystery set in 17th century Edo, now Tokyo), and Bright Young People, by DJ Taylor, nonfiction about the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and 1930s. Evelyn Waugh was one of them, and the book, although I didn’t totally love it, has inspired me to read Vile Bodies, a copy of which that’s been moldering on the shelf since at least last November when I bought it at a library paperback sale.

How has your weekend been? Read anything good lately?

Comments

Phew...I'm exhausted from just reading about your crazy week!

I have to say that I'm a little bummed you didn't like To Defy a King as much as you thought you would....I look forward to your review!

Have a great week Katherine!

HERE is my Sunday post.
Andi said…
Wow! that does sound like a crazy week. Good to have you back.
Andi said…
Wow! that does sound like a crazy week. Good to have you back.
bermudaonion said…
That does sound like a crazy week, but in a good way! Nothing can beat family.

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars...

2015 Reading

January 1. The Vanishing Witch, by Karen Maitland 2. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen 3. Texts From Jane Eyre, by Mallory Ortberg 4. Brighton Rock, by Graham Green 5. Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey 6. Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert 7. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy 8. A Movable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway 9. A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf 10. Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote 11. Maggie-Now, by Betty Smith February 1. Middlemarch, by George Eliot 2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee 3. Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, by Cynthia Lee 4. Music For Chameleons, by Truman Capote 5. Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious 6. Unrequited, by Lisa Phillips 7. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh 8. A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather March 1. Persuasion, by Jane Austen 2. Love With a Chance of Drowning, by Torre DeRoche 3. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 4. Miss Buncle's Book, by DE Stevenson 5. One Hundred Yea...