Sunday Salon

Although the Sunday Salon is supposed to be all about reading, I’m afraid I’m not planning much reading time today. Instead, I’m hoping to spend today getting caught up on blogging — comments, reviews, and end of the year posts — so I can spend the read of the month actually reading and working on my Christmas craft projects.

Earlier this month I made a tentative plan to spend the rest of the year trying to read books I already have — review copies or bought copies — and limit books from the library to try and make a dent on the piles and piles of books that are starting to weigh on me.

Of course, I wasn’t going to pull myself off the lists of holds I’m on at the library, which foiled my plans: Both The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and The Magician King by Lev Grossman arrived for me on Tuesday. Curses, effective library system! (I kid, I kid!).

I’ve written a lot about my love of stunt memoirs. For our first BAND discussion, I called them the “candy in my nonfiction diet” because reading then doesn’t demand a lot out of me. They’re also my “genre kryptonite” — a type of book that I have a strange weak spot for reading. I’ve also thought that perhaps stunt memoirs are my nonfiction form of chick lit.

It’s been a weird week around here. I got a strange cold/fever thing on Monday which kicked my butt for most of the week. I still had to do everything I’m supposed to do at the newspaper, which left me with no physical or mental energy outside of work to do much except watch television and do a little reading. Getting an extra hour of sleep today was amazing.

I must be on the mend, however, because I managed to finish two books this weekend — The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex by Erica Jong.

I couldn’t let another Sunday go by without posting the books I picked up at our local university library book sale earlier this month. I love library book sales, but this one has always been particularly good because there’s such a wide variety of academic and popular nonfiction to choose from. It’s also really well-organized by topic, which makes it easier to browse.

Wow, I am beat! Anyone else who did Dewey’s Read-a-Thon totally brain dead today?

Despite my excursion to the ballet, I managed to finish four books (1,113 pages) in 9 hours and 20 minutes, which I’m totally happy with. I don’t feel like I did as much cheerleading as I did in the past, but I’m not sure.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between books, movies, and television this weekend.

I got started when I started watching the TV show Parenthood, which I just recently found on Netflix Instant. A couple of the early episodes of the first season have a small sub-plot connected to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury — there’s a plagiarized essay about the story and a cute scene where one of the characters (Sarah, played by Lauren Graham [aka Lorelei Gilmore on Gilmore Girls]) starts dating an English teacher who also loves the book.

September was a slow, slow reading month around these parts. And I started out so optimistic about my reading plans, too. I started the month with a list of nine books I was hoping to get read. I actually got through six books this month, which is not nearly the pace I was hoping for. Only three of them were books from my possible list (those in bold), but that’s ok — to do lists were meant to be ignored!

Yesterday, I finally finished a book. And then I started and finished a second book. It was a good book day.

Finishing a book shouldn’t be an exciting occurrence for a book blogger, but it was a big deal for me since I hasn’t finished a book since I read The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach over Labor Day weekend. I went 12 full days without actually finishing a book, which is entirely out of character. It’s not that I wasn’t reading. In fact, it felt like I was reading quite a lot. But I was also switching books constantly because I couldn’t quite get into anything I was reading.