and then she blabbers about them here.
I seem to have missed doing Sunday Salon for a few weeks. Somewhere Sundays got busy, or at least got filled with things which were not reading. But I’m back.
Hi, Saloners!
This week I’ve been reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s wonderful Gaudy Night. Sayers was a mystery writer, Christian thinker, translator, playwright, and general all-around scholar. Mostly I’ve read her mysteries, because they are delightful. They are also so very, very British.
Although I am posting now, in the afternoon, I got my Sunday Salon reading done earlier in the day. Much earlier, in fact. “Today”only in the most technical sense, actually.
I got home late last night, you see, having been out with friends to take in a play. And when I got home, I saw that my brother J was also come home (he having been on a school trip, you see). While in the States, J had bought yet another Terry Pratchett novel. I immediately demanded to read it first (since he hadn’t started, and because I read faster than he does, and because I’m like that) and gave him another one to read that I had already finished.
Looking at the title of this post freaks me out a little bit, because we just had a long, cold, snowy winter, and even though flowers are coming out, it’s hard to believe that winter is finally over. (I hope it’s finally over — we did have snow as recently as the 8th or 9th, but it didn’t stay on the ground.)
Well, what better way to celebrate the end of winter than by . . . um . . . reading a book set in a snowy winter, with a whole town snowed in, and snow a constant recurring motif and . . . actually, there may be many better ways. But I’m still ploughing through Snow, by Orhan Pamuk.
I’m actually not planning on doing much reading today. I finished one book, and I want to make sure that I write its review before I start anything else, just so that it’s fresher.
Instead, I am cataloguing, over at LibraryThing.
I love cataloguing.
It just appeals to me all over. I like putting things in order. I like comparing my library with those of others. I like organizing and tagging books, and hunting down their correct covers and edition information. I like seeing the number of books I’ve done go up on my profile. I like finding the books I share with only one other person on LibraryThing, and keeping track of other library-ish statistics. I like handling all of the books, and using ISBN numbers, and being the only person in the house who knows more or less where every book lives. I like looking at my Author Gallery.
The afternoon started rather bookishly as my brother and I repaired to Chapters after church to buy some books. He goes every week generally and buys one book, as a means to grow his library; I accompanied him this week as I had a gift card to the order of $20.
Twenty dollars! It seems so little once you actually get into the bookstore. As usual, J. went straight to the Terry Pratchett books, while I wandered from section to section in an ecstasy of indecision. Fantasy? Mystery? Chick-lit? Classic? History? I have a mental list of dozens of books I would like to get at some point in time, but it is very hard to choose between them when the money is actually in hand.
Well . . . I did not get that much reading done this Sunday. I was up late on Saturday (sang a performance of the last two thirds of the Messiah — and then the conductor offered to buy the first round and so we all went out) and so on Sunday I was a very sleepy Christine. I went to go visit P. in the afternoon, which usually involves some good reading time on the train — but I fell asleep instead. And then we watched a movie.*
Title: Four Letter Word
Editors: Joshua Knelman & Rosalind Porter
ISBN: 9780307396761
First published: Feb 2008
This edition: Feb 2008
P. came to church with us this morning, and he brought me two books he’d bought for me last week. It was entirely a surprise; P. is not much of a reader (dyslexia) and finds me hard to buy for since he doesn’t know what I’ve read. But these two books were good choices — for more than the reason that I haven’t read them. The one is Green for Life, a new release by Gillian Deacon and is exactly that: a book full of tips, tricks, and ideas for everyday green living.