Sunday Salon: A Catch Up Post

My, how time flies. Has it really been ten days since I last posted? I have no interesting tale to account for my absence; life proceeded as usual but somehow without any blogging taking place.

I have been reading. After a war-heavy first-half of the month, I decided I needed something lighter, less serious than what had come before. I opted for Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, which was just the ticket until the very end. Drat that second world war--along with childbirth-- for spoiling the fun.

I then moved on to nonfiction--after reading a couple reviews of Susan Jacoby's latest, I decided it was time to take Freethinkers down from the shelf. I've read through the chapter on Lincoln and will continue on at a slow pace. I can't decide if I want to buy a copy of The Age of American Unreason (it does have a red cover after all) or wait until it shows up at the library.

Rebecca at Bookstack recently sent me a copy of Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life and this is the book that I spent most of my free time with last week. All I knew about Austen prior to this biography was that she'd written her novels in a front room, hiding her pages under a blotter whenever anyone walked through. I was happy to learn there was much more to her life than that. Now I'm wondering if I ought to give Mansfield Park a second read. . .

I finally read A Boring Story, long hailed as my daughter's favorite story by Chekhov, last Monday, and since then I've been trying to unearth an unread blog post on "A Boring Story" that I'd saved in bloglines a few weeks back (Do you do that? Save posts on books and stories until after you've read the work in question?). I'm beginning to think it didn't save after all because I cannot find it anywhere. If it was your post on Chekhov that I've misplaced, or if you remember who wrote it, please let me know. To top it off, my daughter can't even send me a copy of her essay on "A Boring Story" because it's lost in the computer with the dead hard drive.

I started Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel last night and I'm really enjoying it. The Slaves of Golconda will begin its discussion on Friday and Danielle has arranged for Kari Skogland, the director/screenplay writer of the upcoming movie version of The Stone Angel, to participate.

Coming tomorrow (if the Amazon delivery is on time): my latest stack of new books.