Skip to main content

The Sunday Salon


It’s been a busy week and weekend. I spent a good deal of my free time working on this ten-page paper I had due on Friday. The course I’m taking is an online course that has three webinars over the course of the semester. Yesterday was the second webinar, but since the professor had trouble logging on, we (the students) hung around for about an hour waiting for her. Frustrating considering that this was the webinar where she was going to explain our long final paper to us! Hopefully, though, we’ll make it up somehow.

I spent a good deal of time this week organizing—mostly organizing the documents on my computer and flash drive so that I can find them more easily. For example, I now have a folder for my book-related documents, one for the class I’m taking, and one for things like resumes and cover letters. What I haven’t been good at is writing reviews, so I’m going to try to get to those at some point this week.

So I’m trying to cut back on sugar. Anyone who knows me know I LOVE sweet stuff, but my consumption of sugar contributes to this very small health issue I’m having. Cutting back hasn’t been easy; I still find myself putting sugar in my coffee, or helping myself to chocolate. It’s tough. How do you give up an addiction like that?

Coming up this week: my birthday tomorrow (I’m planning on going out to dinner with my parents), and then more work stuff the rest of the week. I’m currently nearly at the halfway point of Testament of Youth (see photo from my previous Sunday Salon post), which is probably one of my favorite reads so far this year. The way that Vera Brittain wrote about WWI and her reaction to it is just incredible.

How have you all been? Reading anything good?

Comments

Judy Krueger said…
Hi Katherine,
I have a sweet tooth also. I can't give it up completely. What I do is allow myself REALLY small amounts. Trader Joes chocolate chips are really good. Only 100 calories in a tablespoon. I let them melt in my mouth.

I am reading Advise and Consent, the 1960 bestseller by Allen Drury. With how much our world has changed since 1960, I consider it historical fiction. It is long (760 pages) and some of it is quite dry. I had to break down and learn a few things about the US Senate, who does what and how it works. Didn't pay much attention to that in school. After I did that, the book got better. Funny how that works.

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...

Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee

The Piano Teacher is a complicated novel. On the surface, it’s about a love affair between two British ex-patriots in Hong Kong in 1952-3. Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong with her husband Martin at a time when the world is still recovering from WWII; Claire takes up work as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, where she meets Will Truesdale, the Chens’ enigmatic chauffeur. The book jumps back in time between the 1950s and the beginning of WWII, when Will is interned in Stanley, a Hong Kong camp for enemies of Japan. On “the outside” is Tudy Liang, Will’s beautiful Eurasian lover. There’s no doubt that Lee’s writing is beautiful. But there’s something lacking in this short, terse novel that I can’t quite put my finger on. First, I think it’s the tenses she uses when taking about each story: that which is set in the 1950s is in the past tense, while the war scenes are talked about in the present tense (confusing, no?) The interpersonal relationships of the m...