Sunday Salon: Reading Journal

Good morning! The sun is just starting to come up while the clouds are slowly moving in. Today's forecast calls for rain which is perfect for me. Later on I'm leaving to celebrate my grandmother's birthday but until then I plan on reading and relaxing.

My plan last week was to stay off the internet and get some homework done. It didn't happen. I love being online. There's so many things to read and learn about. Thanks to fellow bloggers, I found a ton of books to put on my TBR list and pile and ordered several books this week.

I've been dipping into Language for a New Century: Contemporary from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond all week. It's a massive anthology of poetry from more than 400 poets, from sixty different countries, translated from fifty languages. One of the goals of the book is to introduce readers to poets they would never hear about otherwise. The book has been receiving criticism because it can only give you one poem per poet. I say the book is an introduction. If you want to read more from a poet then go and find their books and help support translated works.

The foreword by Carolyn Forsche gave me goosebumps and made me read it aloud:

We know, from the mellifluous litany of poets' names, who wrote these poems, but we might also consider what wrote them: the urge to sing, pray, cry, announce, and whisper; to write cultures into visibility; to write not after events but in their aftermath, through collisions in time and space, exile within and without; to walk around in the ruins of wars, awake. What wrote them was a determination to revolt against silence with a bit of speaking. What wrote was an upwelling of poetic apprehension of world.

Forsche calls the book "a field guide to the human condition". I think it's a perfect description for all poetry.

Reading this book made me think of my relationship with poetry. As a teenager it was all I read. I checked out the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson hundreds of times in eighth grade. "Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me. . ."

After Dickinson I read and reread the haikus of Richard Wright before moving on to Alice Walker's Her Blue Body Everything we Know. "Good night, Willie Lee, I'll see you in the morning" is a favorite poem from that collection. From there I arrived at Chitra Divakaruni's Black Candle. It stayed next to my bed for months as I read and reread it, raking up library fines.

I wonder what happened, what made me neglect poetry for years? Now Language for a New Century is leading me back to the collections I've loved. Right now Black Candle and the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson are sitting at my nightstand once again, while Her Blue Body is on its way to me. This week poetry has become the first and last things of my day.

What do you think of poetry? Do you read it? If so, what are your favorite poems? Who are your favorite poets? If not, why?

Sunday Salon

My reading this week has been scattered. Last Sunday I finished Daphne's Book by Mary Downing Hahn for The Inner Child Weekend and Childhood Favorites Challenge. I haven't finished a book since then. I've been swamped with homework, studying, kids, and being sick. I'm still a little tired but I'm feeling much better.

I'm almost up to date with homework and studying, so I plan on using today to finish The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. It's a reread for my online book club, The Well-Read Ladies. I'm loving the discussion we're having.

After The Thirteenth Tale I plan on starting a book of poetry called Language for a New Century. It's an anthology featuring contemporary poets from Asia and the Middle East. I also plan on finally dipping into Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. It's been killing me that I haven't been able to give it my attention.

With all the assignments and studying I need to accomplish this week, I think I'm going to take a week-long break from blogging. That way I can spend more time focusing on what I love, reading. I hope you have a good week and see you next Sunday.

Sunday Salon: The Peaceful Post

Good morning! Right now there's no sun in sight and the air is nice and cool. I love these winter mornings. Since I'm in Southern California, snow is not a worry but we did have some rare thunderstorms yesterday. When you do hear thunder, you can't help but pay attention.

Last week I read only children's books again. Something tells me this might be how the rest of the year will be. This week I read:

Ziggy's Blue-Ribbon Day by Claudia Mills. Ziggy is not good at running, jumping, or throwing balls for track-and-field day. Though his teacher told him to try his best and Ziggy will, he knows he won't be receiving a blue-ribbon award. He's an artist, great at drawing. By chance things change and Ziggy might be receiving a blue ribbon after all.


Chicken Feathers by Joy Crowley. Chicken Feathers is the tale of Josh, an ordinary boy living on a farm and his pet chicken Semolina, who can talk. Not talk like a parrot does and repeat what you say, but actually talks. No one believes Josh when he says Semolina can talk, but he has bigger things to worry about. His mom is in the hospital pregnant with his little sister and he suspects a fox is taking eggs from one of the chicken houses.



Potato Joe is a counting book for small children by author and illustrator Keith Baker. The illustrations are simple yet beautiful though my youngest was not interested in it at all.



Ira Sleeps Over by Bernard Waber. I can't believe I have never read this book until now. Ira is going to sleep over his best friend's house and tries to decide whether or not he should take his teddy bear with him. Full of repetition and funny scenes, Ira Sleeps Over is a new favorite in this house.



A Couple of Boys have the Best Week Ever is written by Marla Frazee and was nominated for a Cybils award last year. Frazee is also the illustrator for Sara Pennypacker's great series, Clementine. A Couple of Boys is about James and Eamon's week-long adventure with Eamon's grandparents Bill and Pam. The illustrations are beautiful and the story is great. I didn't want it to end.

This weekend I participated in the Inner Child Weekend loosely hosted by Dovegreyreader. The purpose of the weekend is to put aside your adult reads and read your childhood favorites.


Alexander and the terrible horrible no good very bad day by Judith Viorst has a special place in my heart. It was one of the first books I was able to read by myself. The title explains the story perfectly. When my kids are having a bad day this is the book I reach for.



My other read for this weekend is Daphne's Book by Mary Downing Hahn. I read this book when I was around eleven years old. I was browsing my local library and I remember I just happened to find it. The cover intrigued me. Daphne with her flowing hair and beautiful face sitting back-to-back with Jessica. I don't think I can do this book justice. Just read it. I promise you'll love it.


After Daphne's Book, I plan on reading Lauren Groff's short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale for The Well-Read Ladies book club.

What are some of your childhood favorites? What do you plan on reading this week?

Sunday Salon: January Wrap Up

January has been a very surprising month. The beginning of it was filled with new resolutions, the promise of a better school semester, and a honest chance of tackling my TBR pile. Instead I added dozens of new books and watched as the pile grew. Unread books are now double the number of read books in my home. The school semester is going pretty well, though I do have a professor who is crazy enough to give my class several hundred pages of poetry and autobiographies from the 17th century for assigned reading every week.

Another surprise was how often I turned to children's books. Of the thirty books I've read this month, only four were adult reads: How to Be an Explorer, The Man in the Picture, Gods Behaving Badly, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. All four were great reads. Hopefully this month will be much better for adult fiction since I have a ton of books that are due at the library and I've run out of renewals.

I've only read five short stories this month for the 100 Shots of Short challenge:

"Farewell, Navigator" - Leni Zumas
"Dragons may be the way forward - Leni Zumas
"The Everything Hater" - Leni Zumas
"Heart Sockets" - Leni Zumas
"Lucky Chow Fun" -Lauren Groff

In December I joined The Year of Readers challenge. I pledged $1.50 of my own money for each book I read throughout 2009 to two great charities: 828National and FirstBook. Every month I'm alternating between the two charities. January was the month for First Book.org. With all my reading I earned $45! Next month I'm going to try to match that for 826National.

Currently I have four books going:

Tigerheart by Peter David
My One Hundred Adventures - Polly Horvath (middle school fiction)
Chicken Feathers - Joy Cowley (middle school fiction)
The Butcher and other erotica - Alina Reyes

Hopefully I can get all four read before next Sunday.

What are you reading this week?

Sunday Salon: The Too Many Books Post

Good morning! The sun is just starting to come up here in Southern California. While the rest of the country was expecting Arctic weather, in SoCal the weather was in the late 80s. Then last week the rain came and it felt so good! Now it's the right atmosphere for winter reading.

My week has been really hectic. My oldest son's asthma has been acting up so his father, my mother, and I have been going back and forth, staying at home to take care of him this week. I got very little studying done, but I got some great reading in.

I read:
1. The Shiniest Jewel -Marian Henley. In their shoes & Graphic Novel challenges
2. Tuesday - David Weisner. Young readers challenge
3. How to be an explorer of the world - Keri Smith
4. Don't let the pigeon stay up late - Mo Willems. Young readers
5. A River of words - Jen Bryant. Young readers
6. The Man in the Picture - Susan Hill. NaJuReMoNoMo
7. The Book That Changed my Life. Dewey and Essay Reading Challenge
8. The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle - Jim Butcher. Graphic Novels Challenge

My favorite reads were The Shiniest Jewel, the suspenseful The Man in the Picture, and Welcome to the Jungle. If you're participating in my memoir challenge, In Their Shoes, I'm giving away The Shiniest Jewel. So enter to win it.

This post is entitled "Too many books" because I received some great books this week and bought too many. One of my book-related resolutions this year was to only buy a certain amount of books. I already went way over that, so to compromise I gave a lot of my unread books to my local library and giving more away by hosting a mini-challenge all of February for everyone participating in the Dewey's Books challenge.

With school and a lot of homework to catch up on this week, I plan to read only short stories and poetry for the next two weeks.

What are you reading this week?

Sunday Salon: The Last Sunday

It amazes me that 2009 is just a few days away. This year went by so fast! With my vacation from school lasting until the middle of January, I've been trying to read as many books as possible to make up for all those I couldn't read during the semester.

In the last week or so I read nine books and my favorites are:

Savvy by Ingrid Law
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan
Life is a Verb - Patti Digh
My letter to the world and other poems - Emily Dickinson

Between reading and relaxing, I just had to sign up for some of next year's reading challenges. I promised myself that I would only sign up for six challenges next year, but at yesterday's count I signed up for nineteen! All are pretty flexible and I can make my list as I go. Most of the challenges are new to me, only three are challenges I've heard about or participated in before: Jewish Literature, Book Awards, and the challenge I'm hosting the In Their Shoes Challenge. The great thing about reading challenges is you have the opportunity to sign up to read books you normally would not have read on your own.

On December 31st, I will be posting my 20 favorite books of 2008. So far this year I've read 139 books, most of which were not published this year. It's going to be hard to come up with my top 20, but I'll try. Don't be surprise if you see my top 23 or 25!

Happy New Year!

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!

Sunday Salon: End of Novemebr and everything books

After reading so many great reviews about Neil Gaiman's newest novel, The Graveyard Book, I did something I usually don't do: bought it in hardcover. As much as I love books I never buy a book in hardcover unless it's used. Books are so expensive that I rather check them out at my local library, receive them from paperbackswap, wait a year or more until they come out in paperback or buy them used. I am glad I bought The Graveyard Book.

The description from Amazon perfectly sums it up:

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy.

He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead.

There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy-an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer.

But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family. . . .

I have so many obligations this week: studying for finals, essays, homework, and family that reading this book felt a little rushed so I plan on rereading it later on this week.

I started November out in a book funk. I could not finish any books I started. The cure: picture books. I read so many great picture books like Delilah D at the Library by Jeanne Willis about a young girl with a very big imagination, The Bearskinner by Laura Amy Schlitz which was a spin on a Grimm fairy tale, and Woolbur by Leslie Holakoski about being your own person. My kids loved all three books.

Even in a book funk and with Christmas approaching, I have madly been searching through thrift stores, libraries, paperbackswap, and used bookstores for great finds and have acquired so many great reads ranging from Joyce Carol Oates's The Gravedigger's Daughter, to Ami McKay's The Birth House to Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres. Now I just have to find the time to read!

Have a great week and happy reading!

Sunday Salon

For the past two weeks I have been boycotting my life: boycotting school and its endless assignments and readings, boycotting chores at home (unsuccessfully,) and boycotting life in general. I need a vacation and with a little bit more than a month until I can have one, like the teenager I once was, I am rebelling. I refuse to let my reading suffer a bit more.

Earlier last week I found out about 100 Shots of Short reading challenge hosted by Rob. The challenge has no time limit and no specific titles to read, it's the reader's pick. No one can argue that short stories can take any great amount of time away from one's day. Since I have family and school responsibilities my free time is very limited but my goal is to read one short story a day for the next 100 days.

Last Saturday I checked out The Best American Short Stories 2008. As much as I love short stories, I rarely read a collection of them. Salman Rushdie is this year's co-editor and has picked some great stories. Out of the six short stories I have read so far in this collection, five I have loved. After reading the first two stories, T.C. Boyle's Admiral and Kevin Brockmeier's wonderful The Year of Silence, I knew I had to have this book. Katie Chase, Nicole Krauss, Alice Munro, and Danielle Evans are among the many writers in this collection.

With several fires burning in Southern California, many Californians are stuck indoors because of bad air quality. I am grateful that I am nowhere near the fires and my family is safe. My prayers goes out to everyone in the areas. Have a good week and happy readings!

Sunday Salon: So many books, too little time

As last Saturday's quote says, school is getting in the way of my education. Between assigned readings, field trips, essays, hours and hours of lectures, and my family I have very little time for myself, reading, or nanowrimo.

I'm like most people: a guerrilla learner. I learn whatever it is that interests me, for as long as it interests me before moving on to the next subject. In the last year my interests have included: graphic novels, comics, fairy tales, the perfect personal essay, journal writing, and more. Great for me, horrible for school. Or is it the other way around? Either way I've have had little time to do the things I've loved.

This past week has been a great week for books. Through the mail I've received:
Too Soon Old, Too Little Smart - Gordon Livingston
The Gift: Poems by Hafiz - Daniel Ladinsky
Good Poems for Hard Times
A Broom of One's Own - Nancy Peacock
Life is a Verb - Patti Digh
Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov

I went to the thrift store Friday and walked away with eleven great books including Perfume by Patrick Suskind and Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. Since I have the next two days off from school I plan on reading and writing until my heart is full. Wish me luck.

Sunday Salon: What a beautiful day!

Right now the sun is behind clouds and it is gloomy and cold. I love these kind of days, perfect for reading a book at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee next to me.

Dewey has just made my day by posting the sign-up sheet for October's 24 Hour Read-a-thon. The Read-a-thon is a 24 hour challenge where readers read as much as they can while cheerleaders cheer them on, and there are prize giveaways and mini-challenges almost every hour. You also end up meeting great bloggers who share your passion for books. I'm already eyeing what books I'm going to give away. It's one of my favorite challenges.

This week's theme for Weekly Geeks is to "catch up." So I've decided to catch up on reducing my TBR pile and challenges list and to also catch up on my homework. I've missed a lot in my classes because I'm sick with the flu. I also want to catch up on my magazine reading and journal writing.

I reduced my challenges from 31 to only 4. The challenges I'm keeping are: The 24 Hour Read-a-thon and Kate's Short Story Challenge that has been going on since January and ends in December. I'm also keeping the Classics Challenge and R.I.P. since I only have one book left for both to read. I'm also going to have a personal challenge to read at least ten of the books on my TBR bookcase in the next five months.

This week has been pretty slow for reading. I've read Gloom Cookie by Serena Valentino and The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury, based on the movie by the same title. Both could have been better and both were read for R.I.P. I also read Just who will you be by Maria Shriver. It's a short book based on a commencement speech she gave about knowing who you are. I was expecting more, but . . .

Currently I'm reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. Both are great reads so far and I will post reviews on both later this week.

Have a happy Sunday.