Sunday Salon

I’m the kind of person that writes everything down. I have a ratty little notebook and a pen that comes with me everywhere. I carried it around BEA, and took a bunch of notes about things I just didn’t know before I got there. These notes helped me form some ideas about what I might do next year to make BEA even more fun for me.

I also finally managed to get the few photos I took online, so I want to share some of those with you since pictures — especially of something as huge as BEA — are worth just as much as any words I can come up with.

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.

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.

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).

A couple Sunday Salons ago, I wrote about reading and doing, and I mentioned starting my own Day Zero Project. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally got my list put together and posted at the blog I started to record how my project is going, called Stepping Off the Page. I’m going to be posting my updates for the project there because I didn’t think this blog was a good place for that.

It’s been another very slow reading week for me, and not because of anything wrong with the book I was in the middle of, The United States of Arugula by David Kamp. I just ended up being unexpectedly busy, a week where I spent more time doing — playing soccer, getting drinks, eating out, protesting injustice, and watching movies — than reading. I didn’t finish a single book all week, and that made me feel out-of-sorts.

It also got me thinking about how to balance between the time I need to myself, absorbing stories and new ideas from books, and the time that I need to spend outside of what is, for the most part, a solitary activity. What’s the way to balance between being a reader and being a do-er? What is the point at which a solitary hobby turns into a way to enable a tendency towards solitude?