This is my first Sunday of participating in The Sunday Salon. What is the Sunday Salon? According to its creator:
Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....So a Salon sounds warm and inviting on a cold January day. And here is what I have to say about this week's reading: it was very, very good. To the younger kids, I finished reading Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond. This is my second time reading this one aloud, as I read it to Jesse about five years ago. I love that I can't remember the outcomes of books! I remember liking this book the first time through, but the second time through: wow! My grasp of history has grown much in those five years (I, who was a history minor in college, have learned more history in the past 8 years of homeschooling than I did in 19 years of public-college-graduate schooling) and thus my understanding of historical novels is deeper. I'll review the book later, but I'm so glad I had an opportunity to read it again.
That's what happens at the Sunday Salon, except it's all virtual. Every Sunday the bloggers participating in that week's Salon get together--at their separate desks, in their own particular time zones--and read. And blog about their reading. And comment on one another's blogs. Think of it as an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book.
Participation is open to anyone with a blog and a stack of unread books.
And in my own personal reading, late last night I finished reading The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. This is a memoir about growing up in North Dakota written by my major professor at Iowa State University, Debra Marquart. I have a lot to say about this book and will do it in a proper review soon, but let me just say that Deb's writing is absolutely incredible. I loved this book.
I've got a stack of books by my bedside. I'm eyeing Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos or Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies. Both are books I picked up from reading blog reviews, and both look like just what I need for the rest of this cold, cold Southern night.
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