What are you reading in September 2020?
netla
3 years ago
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Carolyn Newlen
3 years ago
netla
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Lovely September, what are you reading?
Comments (109)Stoneangel-I really enjoyed Lady Macbeth. Loved The Book Thief and we had a good discussion at book club. Several people wondered about the YA classification, which reminded me of our YA discussion a few months ago. I think this book would be wonderful to use in a high school 20th century history class. Quickly read Priscilla Royal's newest (slightly disappointing-forced solution) and a Susanna Gregory mystery. It is an older series and I enjoyed it, and very excitedly went to the library to take out more-and they don't own them! arrgghh! I am a bit down the list for The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny because they bought far fewer copies than they usually would. The library hasn't bought the new Simon Brett yet (budget Woes with a capital W mean NO new books for months now at the branches, and even at the big central library, only a few authors they always buy-like Danielle Steel...and only a few copies instead of the 20 or more) so I got an armful of Miss Read to reread. I need some serenity reading, and she always brings my blood pressure way down. I requested two Rebecca Shaw titles too, after seeing the post above....See MoreSeptember sagas --- and you are reading what, at present?
Comments (42)Sign me up as another one who disliked AJ Fikry. Seemed to me as if the book was written for affect instead of substance. If memory serves, this book came out a few years after Danielewski's (spelling... sorry) House of Leaves with it's eccentric format. Perhaps it is just a copycat effort? Currently reading The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi for book club. I am seeing wayyyy too much political grandstanding and not enough imagination/substance/emotion/thought. Keeping my fingers crossed that no one asks my opinion. I plan on just eating and drinking my way through the evening. Also reading Who was Dracula? by Jim Steinmeyer which is a biography of Stoker and focused on how he found his inspiration and character development for the book Dracula. It delves into his fascination with Victorian Theater, his long employment at the Lyceum in London, friendships with Oscar Wilde, actor Henry Irving (also Stoker's boss at the Lyceum) Walt Whitman and others. A very interesting snapshot of Stoker, Victorian theater, and of course, the novel. PAM...See MoreSeptember 2020, The Ides of September
Comments (47)I am so far behind that I'll never catch up. I stayed busy towards the end of the week, baking multiple batches of desert from scratch for the luncheon following Chris' funeral and burial, and had to make two birthday cakes for Aurora...because, apparently, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it is advised to put the birthday candles on a small cake or cupcake for the birthday child, and let them blow out those candles while having a separate cake for people to eat---a cake no one has breathed all over apparently. So, her birthday candle cake was a small confetti cake with pale pink frosting and her official birthday cake was a hot pink colored vanilla cake with sparkly hot pink sprinkles on top of hot pink vanilla frosting from a can. (The candle cake frosting was a buttercream made from scratch though.) am, quite honestly, sick of the kitchen now and don't intend to cook anything today. Either we'll go out to eat or eat cold sandwiches because I'm officially on kitchen strike. After spending a couple of days in the kitchen baking, I don't even want to eat any baked goods myself. : ) Larry, I have had stored sweet potatoes last up to 18 months in the upstairs spare bedroom, and had some like yours that I just let sprout and grow all winter, and then I took slips from them for spring planting. It is amazing how long a well-cured sweet potato can last when stored indoors. Larry, I think the furnace parts of the HVAC system are harder to repair than the AC air compressor type parts. Tim can fix a lot on the AC himself but has to call the repair guy when the heater needs repair. Nancy, It was such a hard week. I am not sure if anything prepares us for losing someone we love who is younger than we are---it feels unnatural. I know you understand that yourself. This summer we've seen two friends in our own age group, one a wee bit older than us and one a wee bit younger pass away rather suddenly and unexpectedly and I found it much harder to bear than when we lose someone a generation ahead of us. I hope you are feeling better and less melancholy. One of the hard parts about aging (and I know it is a privilege to live long enough to acknowledge that we are getting older....) is that we increasingly lose everyone in our age group and older than our age group--first, perhaps, our grandparents and their generation, then our parents and their generation, and then we start losing cousins, siblings and contemporaries from our school days. Perhaps this is why we increasingly find ourselves turning peculiar and talking more and more to our cats and dogs, or to the garden critters like hummingbirds and butterflies, who are great listeners but cannot carry on much of a conversation with us themselves. (grin) Some friends who used to live here in our neighborhood but who moved down to the DFW metro area about 13 or 14 years ago, stopped by our house after the funeral yesterday and we were sitting around the dining table trying to run through a list of all the local friends and neighbors who had died just in the last year or two and it was an alarmingly long list. We've gained new neighbors and friends, of course, but the newer ones tend to be more in Chris' and Jana's age group, or younger, and not so much in ours. I don't understand how Tim and I have gone from being the newest transplants and pretty much the youngest adults in our neighborhood to being among the oldest. It seemed like it happened so quickly, although of course it has been longer than two decades, because we bought our land here in 1997 and moved here in 1999. I wish I could slow down time, or wave a wand and bring back all of our marvelous old neighbors who were so kind to us and so helpful when we moved here and were attempting to turn a fallow cow pasture and accompanying woodland area into a home, garden and yard. I miss chatting with them all. My greenhouse is only a hoophouse, and an unheated one at that, and I don't even use it as much as I thought I would. We built it mainly to give me a way to grow on transplants outside in it in late winter and early spring after they outgrow the light shelf, so it was going to be an intermediate step between indoor seedlings and transplants going into the ground, but I have used it some years to overwinter zone 8 plants in pots, particularly brugmansias and citrus trees, and even to attempt to grow some garden crops in winter. What I learned from that was that my hoophouse could be used to grow cool-season crops like lettuce and other greens in winter if I used shadecloth and opened all the doors and vents daily to keep it from building up too much heat and inducing cool weather plants to bolt, or I could overwinter tomato and pepper plants in pots by letting it get pretty hot during the day time....but I couldn't do both things at the same time, obviously. If I keep the pepper and tomato plants happy and somewhat productive in winter (fruit size remains small and very slow growing in the greenhouse in winter and it isn't really worth the effort) then the lettuce burns up and vice versa with keeping it cold enough for lettuce which kills off the tomatoes and peppers at night. It needs a new plastic cover and I'm toying with the idea of not getting it one. Maybe we'll move it to the garden, which would involve talking it apart and moving one piece at a time through the garden gate, and cover it with something and using it more in there. I've stared at it and its wind-shredded plastic all summer trying to decide what to do with it this fall, and cannot make up my mind. I'm going to have to decide one way or another though. Larry, Going to sleep every time you sit down sounds like a nice goal. I feel like I could take a nap or two daily and maybe then be more energetic for the rest of the day if I did that. I remember when my dad used to come in from work and sit down in his recliner and nod off while mom was getting dinner on the table, and he was only in his 40s or 50s then. Even a brief little cat nap seemed to revive his flagging energy. Hard work wears out a body at any age, though I do think it wears me out more easily as I get older. I am sure you have found the same to be true. Amy, I generally don't like handling any caterpillars bare-handed, but can tolerate picking the broccoli worms off the plants bare-handed when they are small. I hate those things and they are so destructive to seedlings. I hope you can find replacement plants. HU, Technically you can eat Austrian winter peas, and I might do it if it were a matter of life or death, but the peas get tough and fibrous while very young, so if you want to eat them, eat them while they are small like baby peas. Don't expect them to be all tender and tasty like sugar snap peas though. Larry, I find fall planting so challenging in our climate. It seems like it is too hot and the soil is too dry (or, if it has been raining, too soggy wet) to plant in August and sometimes September and to get a good stand of seedlings, and then the day length is getting too short by the time the conditions moderate and plants finally sprout. I think my last really outstanding fall garden was way back in 2012, although I may have had a half-decent one in 2016. More and more, I am so tired of the heat that I don't want to deal with a fall garden at all, although a lot of that is because of the timber rattlers that come out of the woodland adjacent to the garden to plague me. Then, when the weather cools off in October and I think a fall garden would be nice, it is too late to plant much of anything down here except garlic and spinach. Amy, I found Autumn Joy and several other sedums at Lowe's last fall, but all of them were exhausted and half-dead summer plants that hadn't sold....and which clearly hadn't been watered enough and were barely clinging to life. None of them were new plants for fall sales. I bought them off the clearance/almost-dead-plant rack with just a glimmer of life visible in them and planted them anyway, cutting back all the dead parts pretty hard, and now they look great after being in the ground for about a year. Jennifer, This death hurt so much....and not just for us but for a huge number of people. Firefighters from the D-FW metro who had worked with him at various fires, mostly but not all from his three decades as a professional firefighter with the Lewisville TX FD, came to his funeral in droves. Various professional fire departments provided personnel to perform the traditional firefighter funeral tasks, and even an honor guard from D-FW Airport's fire department, where Chris' son works with our son, took part in the ceremony. A man as active and seemingly healthy as him just shouldn't be gone so soon, and that is a widely-shared feeling here. He had just barely turned 60 and seemed to be very healthy until Covid-19 hit him. I hate Covid-19 and hate that it took his life prematurely. His youngest grandchild, still an infant, won't even have first-hand memories of him and I totally hate that fact. I social distanced and stayed home with the grandkids (and though I hated missing his funeral, I have no regrets there because I am so prone to respiratory illnesses) but Tim estimated there were about 1,000 people in attendance. Social distancing was not being practiced, though his family masked up and arranged the services to allow as much social distancing as possible. They could not force people to comply with proper distancing though. Tim did say that virtually everybody present was wearing a mask, which is a shock because you don't see a lot of folks masked up here in our county in general. We've never had a funeral here that big, and it had to be held at the football stadium because no building in town was large enough to contain it, and the family and funeral home did a great job of planning for a large crowd with lots of help from the fire departments and emergency management personnel. Parts of the procession and services were live-streamed and I could watch it at home while helping the girls blow up balloons and decorate for Aurora's birthday party. For a 6-year-old she was extraordinary in accepting that the birthday celebration she was having later in the day was not at all the one we originally planned and she never complained on e, and she told me she thought Capt. Kirk was "a handsome man" and said yesterday that she wished she had known him herself. I'm also grateful to our many friends who took photos and videos and posted them as it enabled me to see as much of it as possible. Now, we all take a deep breath and carry on, and try to support and encourage his family as much as we can while they grieve and adjust to their new reality. For the garden area you feel is underperforming, how about a soil test? Perhaps one nutrient or another is out of kilter there and a soil test would show that. I am looking at my increasingly shaded garden, built beginning in 1999 about 15' from a woodland that now has grown out to its fence, and thinking we need to move the whole thing. I hate this, but it will become inevitable at some point unless we cut down a bunch of gigantic trees, which we'll never do. They are too big to cut down at this point without spending thousands of dollars per tree to pay someone else to do it. I really blame the almost 80" of rain we got in 2015 for this, because that heavy rainfall caused the woodland to explode in growth and suddenly a woodland that was some distance away from the garden was practically in the garden, seemingly overnight. I've been fighting a losing battle to keep the woodland out of the garden ever since then. In some future year, and not too far in the future, we should build a new raised bed garden closer to the house and further from the woodland, but I hate the thought of starting over. Even if we laboriously moved the current beds one wheelbarrow load of soil at a time so we don't lose all the great soil we've spent two decades building, which is what I'd prefer to do, I cannot image starting over in a completely new garden location. So, maybe we'll cut off the northern edge of the garden and let the woods have that back, and try to keep a much smaller garden going in the remaining raised beds in sunnier areas. Already, the front garden is only about 1/4 the size it once was, so I don't feel like we can surrender much more to the encroaching woodland. The woodland growth is so relentless though that it will win in the end. I keep daydreaming about a very selective tornado coming through, missing the house and garden, and taking out the acre of woodland next to the garden, but that is a silly pipedream that's never going to happen. Enjoy the showers and the lead-up to the wedding, and I hope your son returns from Portland healthy and happy. I understand why you aren't happy about him going there. That place is such a hot spot of activity lately. My sister is looking at yet another wedding I guess. Her stepdaughter got married in a beautiful vineyard wedding last month, and then on Friday night, her daughter became engaged to her long-time boyfriend. Love is in the air...apparently. Oh Jen, your poor friend and his fingers! My heart aches when I think of the pain and shock he must have endured. I wish him speedy healing and successful rehabilitation. A part of me agrees with Cliff, but I also agree with you. If woodworking is so vitally important to your friend, the kids won't even be able to make him give it up...nor should they. Perhaps they can help him review his work and ensure safety measures are in place. It often is when folks here have to give up farming or ranching that they quickly decline and then die. I believe being able to maintain their interests, livelihood and regular routines are what keep them going as they age into their 80s and 90s. Fred used to say we'd never see him give up his activities because the alternative was to just sit on the porch until you die. He had to cut back on his farming, ranching and gardening in his 90s, but his nephew and son did a great deal of it for him and around him and kept him mentally engaged in the process long after he no longer could physically engage in much of anything. Farmgardener, Thanks for understanding so well. Our friend mentored literally hundreds if not thousands of younger firefighters over the decades, and it was the most wonderful thing to see so many of them come here for his services and to comfort the family. Some people kept looking at all the fire apparatus and firefighters from a widespread area of Texas and scratching their heads and wondering what they were doing here in this tiny Oklahoma community, but those of us who knew how much he meant to those he mentored and taught understood exactly why all those folks came both from near and far. It now is the responsibility of all those younger firefighters to teach and mentor just like Chris Kirk and Jesse Kirk did for so many decades. No one ever thought we'd lose them both just 13 or 14 months apart, but if there is any comfort in this whole thing, it is that Chris is reunited with his father and mother in Heaven. We do have many accomplished firefighters and emergency management people here in our county who are extremely dedicated to continuing the work that he and his dad performed for decades, training and mentoring younger, newer firefighters and working to maintain unity between all departments and all personnel. That is their legacy that lives on behind them. There are so many virus cases here now that it is getting scary. Our daughter in law said this week that her hospital has 8 Covid patients currently, which is a lot for such a small hospital, and she is somewhat concerned by the rising number of patients. Down here along the river, we kept caseloads and hospitalizations low for months and were so pleased with that, but all that ended a couple of months ago and it has been increasingly bad ever since then. Since the virus spreads asymptomatically, literally any person with whom we interact could be carrying it, and that is what is of great concern. We always wear masks out in public, but I hate wearing one because it makes me feel so claustrophobic, so even if we go to the store, I rush through the experience and just hurry to get what we need and get out of the store so I can take off that mask. Leisurely shopping is a thing of the past. (Tim should enjoy this because the less time I spend shopping, the less money I spend. lol.) Friday night, Aurora said she really wants to go to Red Lobster (we took the girls there earlier in the summer before the virus case load began rising so much again) and eat crab whenever we can safely do to. It cracked me up, as she was munching on chicken strips at Cracker Barrel at the time, and crab seems like a rather exotic thing for a 6 year old to be craving. As far as I know, she hasn't eaten crab except for a bite or two that Tim gave her from his plate the last time we were at Red Lobster, but she must have liked it. She also gravely informed her she'd never eat shrimp because she is allergic to it (but we aren't sure she actually is allergic). Maybe one day we can take her to Red Lobster again once it seems safe to do so. Amy, I hope Ron is okay and is not still reacting to the flu shot. Dawn...See MoreWhat are you reading? - Dec 2020
Comments (102)I haven't shared in a bit as I've been reading a lot of "throw aways".. primarily from a few mystery series (Aaron Elkin's Gideon Oliver mystery series for one) they suited the state of my mind and my available time. Ive recently returned to novels such as Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman -it was ok, readable, not too heavy but not all that memorable - 3.5. The Searcher by Tana French I do enjoy Tana French and this was no exception. It is a departure from her Dublin Murder Squad series and I'd say it's one of my favorites. 4.2. I am currently reading What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and am very much liking the writing and the process of building the relationships between the characters-- a strong friendship between two men and ultimately their families. I am not far enough along to hit the trials of the friendships which i know are to come (thanks Amazon and Good Reads), but much as i know the story path will get dark, i expect to continue to like her writing. The setting is in the 1970s art and literary world and i especially enjoyed the discussions on art-- the portrayal of women's bodies and the role of artist and observer. I am barely 1/3 in ... so we'll see how it progresses. Has anyone read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig? I am curious to see what others think of it-- I think that's on deck for me....See Morevee_new
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