Sunday Salon

My reading week started out great with me reading the first two books in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series: Storm Front And Fool Moon. Harry Dresden is a young wizard living in present day Chicago, fighting demon-calling sorcerers, vampires, werewolves, fairy godmothers, and many more creatures of the Nevernever, a land just for special creatures. Everything was going okay, until someone started sending these creatures Harry's way. . .

These were great books, fast-paced with a great plot. In the first book, Storm Front, the only thing that turned me a bit off was all of Harry's sarcasm. You know the character is doing it so he won't be so serious, but a couple of times I wanted to just close the book because it started to become a cliche. Run-in with a strange creature, almost get killed, sarcasm. Fool Moon had less of the sarcasm and was just as well-written as Storm Front.

We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson is a beautiful tribute to all the men who played Negro League Baseball and those who organized it. The book is a non-fiction picture book aimed at readers eight and up. The illustrations are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I don't know anything about baseball now or then, but the conditions these great athletes played in for the love of the game was astonishing: because of segregation many times there was no place to sleep after a game so many players slept crammed in a car with other teammates, sometimes there was no place to get a meal or take a shower. . . Not to mention the sixty-year agreement by white major league owners to not allow any African-American to play in the major leagues. This is one of my favorite books of the year and I am so glad I read it. I don't normally buy hardcovers, but I will definitely be buying this book soon.

Have a great week and happy readings!