Space Station Mir

Today's Top Ten Tuesday is a freebie topic, but I saw the Chocolate Lady doing book to movie adaptations, so I decided to list my favorite book to screen adaptations, which are often TV series. However, I won't get into the ones I hate, which my husband finds an endless source of amusement. Happy Top Ten Tuesday over at That Artsy Reader Girl ! My Favorite Book to Screen Adaptations The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society-Netflix's adaptation is quite true to the story, leaving out only some extraneous details and characters, and upping the gorgeous Guernsey scenery! Game of Thrones/A Song Ice and Fire-I know people are divided on this, especially since the book series isn't finished, but having read all of the books, I frankly thought the TV series was better and much less convoluted. The Witcher-I've only read one of the Witcher books, but I loved the Netflix adaptation and hope there's more. To All the Boys I've Loved Before-I LOVED ...

Reading This Week I finished So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, which I bought from the Black-owned Mahogany Books in D.C. during the #BestsellerBlackout. Highly recommend as a helpful guidebook to racial issues in the United States. Chapters cover definitions of racism, intersectionality, privilege, police brutality, cultural appropriation, and more. I was familiar with the concepts, but Oluo explains them fully, illustrating with her lived experience as well as research. This is definitely the kind of book that makes me feel like I need to learn more though, kind of like bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody. This week, I also got the third magazine that I subscribed to in a deal with magazines.com, Martha Stewart Living . I've never been a Martha Stewart fan (or hater), but it seemed like the kind of comforting content I would appreciate these days, and I was absolutely right. Plus, it has a surprising number of book recommendations! Watching This Week ...

I've had the good fortune to attend a lot of dream book festivals, namely the National Book Festival in DC, since I live so close, which always has an incredible lineup of headliners, even though it's gotten way more crowded in recent years! Sadly, I'm sure it will not take place this year. I'm also lucky enough to live close to the Baltimore Book Festival, which is always a fun local event with authors I love and lots of new local authors to meet and books to buy. If that weren't enough, I've also been spoiled enough to be close to the Gaithersburg Book Festival, which often draws some big names due to its proximity to the capital as well as lots of local organizations and booksellers. I lived in Boston when the first annual Boston Book Festival occurred, and I also got to attend the Chicago Humanities Festival when I lived there. I'd highly recommend all of those events and definitely want to attend them again, but I still do have some dream bookish events...

I've done a fair amount of reading this week, but, most exciting, I finished the first draft of my book yesterday! Reading This Week Finished Your Perfect Year by Charlotte Lucas. I got the ebook for free from Amazon on World Book Day. I got started on #WIT (Women in Translation) month a little early this year. This book is translated from German and takes place in Hamburg, and I really enjoyed it. The story centers around a pre-filled planner for a perfect year, discovered by a man named Jonathan, who finds himself drawn to following the events written out in the planner. Meanwhile, we also see the story of Hannah, whose place in the story gradually becomes clear. I love this idea of a pre-planned year and it's definitely a fun and thoughtful read.  This week, I also finally got a couple of new-to-me magazines that I subscribed to recently, Real Simple and Better Homes & Gardens. Although I probably wouldn't have had time for them in the pre-pandemic era, I real...

I read a lot more books that make me think rather than smile. Not that there aren't plenty of giggles in Middlemarch , but it doesn't have the enchantment of middle grade fantasy or the belly laughs of full-grown adults aware of their mistakes. The latter are the books that have made me laugh the most in recent years: memoirs by David Lebovitz and Jen Lancaster have carried me through some rough times. And the former will always bring a smile to my face. Happy Top Ten Tuesday over at That Artsy Reader Girl! Books That Make Me Smile The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George Brave New Girls ed. Mary Fan and Paige Daniels-these anthologies are full of stories about girls and women winning science fiction! very uplifting, Star Trek-style scifi! Cinder by Marissa Meyer American Cake by Anne Byrn-who doesn't love learning about cake?! The 100 M...

The fireworks seem to have calmed down in my neighborhood this week--I'm almost afraid to write this lest I jinx it. Since they started on Memorial Day, I was not hopeful they would end with the Fourth of July, but they do seem to have slowed down for now at least. Hopefully, they emptied their stashes on the Fourth. My poor puppy hid under the couch in the basement for most of that night; we could just barely see his snout. My other dog will bark back, but she doesn't really care that much. In terms of reading, it's been a somewhat productive week. In terms of writing, less so. Reading This Week I've been reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell for one of my book clubs. I've never read a Malcolm Gladwell book before, although I've heard of him. I also did not realize he was half Black, as he alludes in the book. I thought he was White. The book is a set of premises with an extended parade of supporting anecdotes, some of which were more interesting than othe...

When I have a favorite author, I tend to go all in, and some of my favorites have quite substantial oeuvres. Most of my most-read authors are still from children's book series, but I'm starting to build libraries of my adult favorites too! Authors I've Read The Most Books By William Shakespeare- 25 plays, two epic poems, and a lot of sonnets --------------------------having attended grade school where I was required to read at least one Shakespeare play a year since seventh grade and been an English major in college, it's not surprising that Shakespeare is my most-read author. What is surprising is, I still have more to go Marilyn Kaye-the  Replica  series- 24ish books  (I think I skipped one or two)--------------------------I read this series completely from beginning to end. I think there were was maybe a second series later but I didn't read any of those. I loved these science fiction-y books centering a preteen girl who finds out she's a genetically...

I've decided to try making my weekly wrap-up into a Sunday Salon so I can link up with others doing Sunday Salon posts.  We'll see how this goes! Reading This Week I finished Middlemarch!  I've  been reading this one almost since we started staying home in mid-March. I loved it. I'd never read Eliot before, but wow! She's such a talented, insightful writer, she just gets human nature and relationships and she's so well-read--the metaphors, the similes, the allusions...the book is a masterclass. And I love, love, love the ending. She wraps it up for the characters to give a sense of closure but it's also satisfyingly realistic. No perfect HEAs here. I'm sure I'll be talking about this more! I just started reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell for one of my book clubs. If you haven't heard of it, it's about the science behind how we make snap judgments and how we can use that to our advantage. Not a book I would have picked, but interestin...

When I started reading Fleishman Is In Trouble for my book club, it struck me as problematic immediately. At first, I was bothered by the opening scene, where a rich cishet White man objectifies women on a dating app. Soon, however, it began to bother me in an entirely different way. The entire premise of the book upsets me, and I'm not sure if that's because it reveals an uncomfortable truth (I lean away from this one) or distorts an uncomfortable truth (I lean toward this). The narrator of the novel, Toby Fleishman's female friend Elizabeth, explicitly posits that readers are more interested in men, who appear to live meaningfully, while women and minorities' lives are circumscribed by their oppression. She suggests that one would have to "Trojan horse" writing about a woman by writing about it as the life of a man. Enter Toby Fleishman. A sensitive, caring father significantly out-earned by his ambitious, hardworking wife Rachel, Toby's own divorce...

I finished more books in June, although one of them I'd been reading for a long time and several were rereads. A lot of poetry this month. Books Finished in June Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn The Art of Showing Up: How To Be There for Yourself and Other People by Rachel Wilkerson Miller You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero (reread) Blue Horses by Mary Oliver (reread) Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich (reread) Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes Thoughts I've been reading Wherever You Go, There You Are since March when we first started staying home due to COVID19. At first, I strongly disagreed with Kabat-Zinn's insistence on the unimportance of spirituality in meditation (he doth protest too much), but I found the meditations and writing practices helpful, of which I did one per day over the course of several weeks. Kabat-Zinn specializes in pain managemen...