Communities

Do you ever have weeks where it feels like everything that could possibly happen all happens at the same time and it seems like you can’t even find time to think? That was the last couple of weeks for me.

This general sense of life busyness started 11 days ago. In that time I’ve worked full time, plus… played two soccer games, gone to one birthday party, driven to and from Minnesota twice (for a total of about 18 hours in the car), gone to dinner, took a sick day, volunteered, went to an author event, went to my book club, visited all of my grandparents, visited a friend’s family in the hospital, and attended a funeral. I also wrote two freelance stories and a guest post and read two books.

Last week I asked for some suggestions for foodie fiction that could be options for the next edition of BookClubSandwich, the online foodie book club I co-host with Andi (Estella’s Revenge). We got a lot of great suggestions — both fiction and nonfiction — that I trimmed down to five choices. Below is the list, plus some info about each book, and a poll at the bottom to vote.

I’m back in Minnesota this weekend, so I’m probably not going to get any reading done today. And since it’s the beginning of May, it seemed like a good day to take a look at my reading from the past month and what I want to try and read in May. Plus, the first third of the year is over which makes it an apt time for a few bookish stats from the year so far.

I’ve been in some sort of funk the last couple of weeks. I mostly blame it on the weather — we had a few nice days, and then Mother Nature decided to smack everyone in the face with a sleeting/raining/snow storm on April 19 that caused my car to get stuck. In April! I was not at all pleased. But even with that, it’s just been an out-of-sorts week or two, so earlier this week I was looking for a book to pull me out of the funk.

I had a lot of options, but I ended up grabbing a copy of Erin Blakemore’s The Heroine’s Bookshelf, which I’ve had on my shelves for awhile now. A book about literary heroines seemed like the kind of book that could potentially cheer me

One of my very favorite things is sitting down and planning to read just a few chapters of a book, but getting so wrapped up in the story that I just end up finishing the whole thing.That’s what happened to me yesterday with Melissa Coleman’s memoir This Life is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone. I started it after I got home from the Farmer’s Market in the morning, and four hours later I was finished with the book and left with no coherent sentences to explain how amazing it was, just a few words I jotted at the end of my notes: “Ominous, elegant, honest, relevant, evocative… just beautiful.”

It’s Sunday morning, I’ve got some tea, and I am going to spend the day binging on The West Wing and recovering from reading 1,420 pages over an 18-hour span during the April 2011 Read-a-Thon.

Yesterday’s Read-a-Thon was the first time I made a concerted effort to participate for the entire event. Last October I was a reader, but I was also in Iowa hanging out with my sister and spent a lot of time not reading. And I don’t think I ever tried to read before that.

Today is the Read-a-Thon! I’m psyched! Yesterday I posted my two very ambitious book stacks, finished cleaning my apartment (except doing laundry…), and got my pile of snacks ready. I suspect I meant to do more than that, but now I can’t figure out what!

This Read-a-Thon I’m at home in Madison in my very quiet apartment. My roommate is at a conference and my boyfriend is otherwise occupied for the day. I have Hannah, my cat, and a friend might be joining me later. I’m expecting a pretty chill day.

Tomorrow is Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-Thon, and I’ve been excited about this for weeks. I decided to read only my own books tomorrow even though I have a loooong list of review books for April that I am making almost no progress on. I want to just be able to relax and not have to think to much about taking notes or what I might say reviewing the books. Plus, I have a lot of books on my shelf that I’m anxious to get to, and this seems like a good excuse.

This morning I made a quiche, and it was excellent. You can read a little bit about it and see a fuzzy picture at my Day Zero project blog.

Now, for reading: At the beginning of March I proposed a “perfect” reading month — the books I would read that would make me feel satisfied with how I spent my time with books. So how did I do in fulfilling that goal? Pretty good! Here’s my reading list for March, with books from my original “perfect month” list in bold (links go to my reviews).