Sunday Salon

Yep, I am one of those people who is super excited about the Super Bowl today. Even though intellectually I know there are a lot of things to criticize about professional sports, I still love watching a good football game. Come tonight, I’ll be on my couch cheering and eating snacks. I still haven’t decided whether to cheer for the Ravens or the 49ers, but I think this guide to picking a team may help me choose.

This week I finally had an “enough is enough” moment and decided to focus on finishing at least one book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marsha Pessel. There’s sort of an interesting back story to this book. When it came out in 2009 first came out I was really interested, bought a used hard cover at Half Price Books, bought it, and proceeded not to read it.

I promise, I promise, this is the last of the “business-y” posts I’m going to do before getting back to writing about books. It feels like I haven’t written a full book review in forever (although a look back at my archive says it’s only been about three weeks). But before I can do that, I have to do this little retrospective and look forward at my reading goals.

How does narrative help us process tragedy? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself all weekend, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School led me down a rabbit hole of stories about school shooting.

As details about the shooting was trickling out on Friday afternoon, I was glued to the television and online news sources trying to find more information. That’s my impulse when tragedy occurs, to just find as much credible information as I can. I have no patience for cable news speculation or “expert” interviews. I just want to know, from people who are close to the situation, what is going on. This is not unique to me, I’m sure, but I think it helps explain what I did next.

Before I went outside to unearth my car from the frigid drifts, I got to spend the morning reading a book. I’ve gotten in a nasty habit of starting my day out with television instead of reading, which has been good for keeping up on my shows, but not so good for my reading life (or, frankly, my mental health — reading helps keep me sane). It was nice to spend a few hours with a cup of tea, a big fuzzy blanket, and a fun book — Taft 2012 by Jason Heller.

Happy Sunday! This week was one of my favorite bookish events of the year — our university library book sale. The selection at this sale is always extensive — and with paperbacks at $.50 and hardcovers at $1 — it’s hard not to leave without several books.

Whew! This week really got away from me in both reading and blogging. I haven’t finished a book in about two weeks. It’d be a little distressing, if I weren’t enjoying the things I’ve been distracted by so much.

I blame my sister for getting me hooked on a goofy BBC/SyFy show – Merlin – the story of a young Merlin and Arthur Pendragon before Arthur is crowned king of Camelot. The special effects are pretty terrible and it seems that someone is at risk of dying in every episode, but the relationship between Merlin and Arthur is charming and funny.

A few months ago, I decided that I would go on a book buying hiatus for the summer. There were two small exceptions — if I visited a town with a bookstore, I could buy one book; if it was an independent bookstore, I could buy two books.

Since summer officially ended last week, I figured it was time for a final look at how I did on this little project (after doing a short update in July).

t’s the first Sunday of football season and I am, sadly, not watching any games today. Our cable isn’t hooked up at our new house yet (don’t even get me started on that…), so I’m spending my afternoon getting text updates from friends and obsessively checking my fantasy football scores online. It’s less than ideal.

Unfortunately, even with all my time without the Internet and cable this week, I haven’t gotten much reading done. There’s been a lot of cleaning and organizing and furniture-building, but not much reading.