Sunday Salon: Portland

Oct 232011

Hello friends! Today’s post is going to be intentionally vague, because instead of writing it on Sunday like usual (okay, Saturday, I’m a compulsive post scheduler) I’m writing it on Wednesday. Why, might you ask, am I doing this? Why, because I’m currently in Portland, OR and as much as I love you all I get to “talk” to you all the time and if I’ve ever been to Portland I was in about 5th grade, and I’m visiting a college roommate I haven’t seen in over two years and her adorable new baby. So…yeah. Writing this on Wednesday and wishing you the best, and probably playing with a cute baby or visiting Powells or something as you read this. Plus, all of you who are bloggers have a reading hangover from yesterday’s Readathon, so you are likely not reading this in the first place.

Here’s what I read this week (or, what I anticipated on Wednesday I would have finished by this point… is this getting confusing yet?):

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What’s with all of the yellows up there? Anyway, if I did happen to finish anything else, I guess I’ll just throw it on next Sunday’s post. At least I know for sure what I reviewed this week, because as I’m writing this I’ve already scheduled everything (lots of red and black/grey this week, funny!):

Hope you’re all having a wonderful Sunday!

TSS: GLiBA

Sunday Salon 8 Responses »

Oct 162011

Hello from beautiful Dearborn, Michigan! At least I’m going to assume it is beautiful – the drive from Chicago sure is, with all of the leaves changing colors – but while I’ve been here I’ve mostly seen the inside of the hotel. I’m currently schmoozing with booksellers from independent bookstores at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association (GLiBA) trade show. Actually, now I’m getting ready to go home, but most of the weekend I’ve been schmoozing with booksellers; they’re good people, booksellers are, so excited about books. I’m learning about lots of new books too, I’ll be sharing more about them with you in the coming weeks.

For now, though, here are the books I finished this week:

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I reviewed a lot of books I’m excited about this past week, too. However, before we get to those, I’m almost even MORE excited about the Hot Fall Books guides I wrote for SheKnows.com:

Fiction | Nonfiction | Audiobooks

So check those out FIRST, and then check out the latest What’s Old is New show about Lord Byron, and THEN check out my reviews from last week (there is a giveaway to go with The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, don’t miss it!):

The Sunday Salon – Family Time

Oct 092011

This is going to be a quick one, because my parents are in town visiting this weekend. Daniel loves his Nana and Papa and, once the summer is over, he doesn’t get to see them very often, so we’re off doing fun things with them this weekend, despite the fact Daniel got sick Friday night (he is much better now, other than not having a huge appetite). We went to a local carnival-like pumpkin patch yesterday and had a blast.

I have a feeling that October may be a slow reading month, because I will be doing a lot of traveling (and packing, and unpacking, and laundry…), but it actually got off to a pretty good start. I’m really impressed with how much I read, considering Lionheart is 600 pages of Sharon Kay Penman’s trademark deliciously dense historical fiction.

Print:

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Audio:
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And here’s what I reviewed last week:

I also talked about The School of Night and Louis Bayard’s other books and posted about the fall books I want to Drop Everything And Read.

TSS: Red Books

Sunday Salon 12 Responses »

Sep 252011

Hubby traveling all last week = me reading a lot. I had a lot of other work to do this week, but I have a tendency to stay up too late when he’s gone, so I still got a ton read. And, as an aside, at least he came back before we had the fun of Daniel learning how to climb out of his crib (and fall down and freak himself out).

Anyway, here’s what I read this week:

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So many red books! It always amuses/confuses me when that sort of thing happens with covers. Anyway, here’s what I reviewed this week:

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Sep 182011

We had some seriously Fall-like weather this week – after summer reappeared on Monday with highs of close to 90. Daniel and I went and celebrated the dry, cool day yesterday by taking a little trip out to an apple orchard to pick a nice big bag of apples.

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I think that homemade apple chips and applesauce are in our future next week.

Okay, guys, I don’t know what is going on, but I’ve really been rocking the audiobooks lately. Somehow I seem to be finding all sorts of extra time to listen to them. I finished TWO this week (25 hours of audio), which is crazy, because it used to basically always take me two weeks to finish one. Oh, also, they were both fantabulous.

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I also finished three print books:

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This week I posted four reviews, in addition to recommending to you some of my favorite blogs and talking about how my reading has changed in the 3+ years I’ve been blogging:

Weather Guilt and Review Madness

Aug 282011

Right now a hurricane is battering the East Coast, but all is calm and lovely here in Chicago. We had a fun barbeque with friends last night and will potentially go to a picnic this afternoon. I must admit that I feel a little guilty that we have some of our nicest weather of the summer while East Coast friends get battered.

This has been a great reading week thanks to a train trip to/from downtown by myself on Sunday, plus my new reading/writing/cleaning plan. Basically I’m alternating reading, writing, and cleaning nights on the nights I’m at home, hoping that it makes me more productive in each of these things. My first reading night sure seemed productive, since it let me finish all three books I had going at the time.

I’m now actively picking things I do NOT think I will finish before the end of the month, though, because I have decided to try to be completely caught up on reviews by the end of the month, thanks to some inspiration from Jennifer at Literate Housewife. I’ve still got at least two posts/day to write to be caught up, so not finishing things keeps me from adding anymore to the too-long list. Here’s what I finished this week:

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And here’s what I reviewed:

TSS: Busy, Busy

Aug 212011

This has been a BUSY WEEK. Last night was the first time since Monday that I was actually home to read Daniel his bedtime story. Luckily we had three brand new books to choose from, two that were sent by Macmillan Children’s and one that I bought at an event earlier this week:

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We read the first two last night, and I cannot WAIT to read the third with him today.

———–

I just found out after I wrote this post that I was nominated for Best Audiobook Blog for BBAW, which is very exciting. I guess I’ll be spending this evening deciding which posts to submit. I really appreciate all of you who nominated me.

———–

The busy week had a lot of late nights with mostly non-bookish things, although it did include an awesome event (where I bought Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums) at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn seeing Melanie Benjamin talk about her new book, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb. I now have my pretty signed hardcover and can’t wait to get a few minutes to settle down with it.

I got a bunch of reading done on Sunday before the week really started, finishing everything that had been languishing last week, and then not too much since then. Still, I’m pretty happy with what I did get read, especially yesterday, when I had the house to myself for awhile, and I’m looking forward to some more reading time today. Here’s what I did finish last week:

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And what I reviewed:

I also wrote about the Harper Perennial 20 ebooks for $20 sale and the amazing event I attended at the Tuscan Market & Wine Bar with Gregg Hurwitz.

TSS: Fall Book Season Approaches

Aug 142011

Okay, y’all, I can tell that fall book season is nearly upon us, because I am DR.OWN.ING in new books that have come in over the past could of weeks. Some great stuff has come in, and I can’t wait to get reading it all. Here’s some of the stuff I received so far in August that has me most excited:

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The only problem is, my brain seems to be shutting down in response to all the books that have come in the mail, and I’m having a hard time finishing much of anything, although I can partially blame my unproductive week on reading books for readalongs, but that’s only a small part of the reason. Here’s what I did finish:

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As an aside, I find it interesting how often all of my covers for a week seem to sort of go together. This week is characterized by black background, it seems.

And here’s what I reviewed last week, not so much coordination in the colors here:

TSS – Bookish Odds and Ends

Aug 072011

This is one of those weeks where, now that I think back on it, I’m not even sure what we did. Somehow, though, I didn’t have much reading time. Not during lunches, not in the evenings.

bloodspell picture One of my reading-free lunch times was really fun and bookish, though. YA author Amalie Howard was in town, and I had the opportunity to meet her and Julie from JKS Communications for lunch. We had a fabulous time talking all things bookish and book promotion. Definitely a fun time, and I can’t wait to read Amalie’s book – if only for that gorgeous cover!

Other fun news, I recently realized that I managed to finish the What’s In A Name 4 Challenge, which is very exciting. Here’s what I ended up reading for the different catagories:

Evil: Original Sins
Jewelry/Gem: Dragonfly in Amber
Life Stage: Mothers & Daughters
Number: A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
Size: Little Rabbit Lost / Wide Sargasso Sea
Travel/Movement: The Statues That Walked

So overall it was a great bookish week, even if it wasn’t a very high page count sort of week. Here’s what I finished in print:

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And in audio:

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And, of course, what I reviewed this week:

TSS – Melting

Jul 242011

Hey, remember those huge dumps of snow we had back in February? Yeah, I’m ready to bring those back after this week. I’ll take the annoyance of coats/hats/scarves/gloves over being perpetually hot ANY day. Winter chills can be taken care of by getting in a hot bath with wine and a book. A cold bath is not so nice for reading.

On the other hand, there is a slight advantage to it being beastly hot, and that is that reading is the only thing that sounds remotely appealing. My husband was away on business last week, so it was just Daniel and I, and we had dinner with family every night. Other than the night when Daniel stayed with my dad and my mom and I went to see Harry Potter, Daniel and I would get home most nights just in time to put him to bed. Now, our air conditioning is in good condition, but our condo is old and our windows inefficient, which means that it can be tough to cool the place down, which, in turn, meant that I had no desire to turn on a computer and add any more heat to the house, which also precluded watching tv.

When it was just too hot even to flip pages, I laid on top of my bed listening to an audiobook and playing games on my phone until it cooled down. After that, I would pick up a book and read, often until well after midnight when it was finally cool enough to get to sleep. The upshot is that I finished quite a few books (and am now even farther behind on reviews):

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Luckily, I had quite a few things prescheduled this week, so there was content here, even though I had no desire to sit with a computer on my lap. One particularly interesting thing was an interview between authors Kim Wright and Sarah Pekkanen discussing social media and the ways in which authors help one another. In addition to that, were a number of reviews: