The Sunday Salon

February has given way to March, the s-n-o-w has finally melted, the spring winds have arrived and sunshine is slowly but surely returning…hope SPRINGS eternal!

As always, I’ve so many books n articles n websites n magazines n the like to write about that I haven’t written about ANY of them! *shakin’ head* I’m so weird. No, you say? Who else do you know says they have so MUCH to blog about books they’ve read that they just don’t blog at ALL?!? *nods* Yeah, I thought so.  Yada, yada…let’s see…most recent reads to talk about…

Upon starting to read Maddie Dawson’s The Stuff That Never Happened , I confess to being a bit leery–okay, a LOT leery. At first glance, this was going to be a book about a midlife crisis, about a discontented middle aged couple with a freshly emptied nest who realized they had lost the ‘us’ along the way.  As I am 40 years old and coming upon our 20th wedding anniversary with our children just turning 18 and 16, I was skeptical of this book–for I was and still am not interested in a midlife crisis affair story. Mind you, that was my assumption of this book, not what the story actually turned out to be.

I typically do not read a whole lot of book reviews that give in depth details, and if you’ve read this space much you know that my comments about books aren’t so much reviews as they are…well, comments. What grabbed me or didn’t grab me, not a synopsis or detailed story summary.

One of my absolute favorite things to read are author back story comments…what he or she was thinking, what spurred this story, things like that. It was just this sort of thing that nudged me to read The Stuff That Never Happened. I read this post (clickityclick right there) and picked up the book that afternoon. As I read, I couldn’t help but like the characters and all their flaws, each individual was perfectly and wonderfully human.  What a good story…that’s likely my best compliment to a book–a good story that turns the pages all by itself.

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A couple of days ago I started reading The Paris Wife by Paula McLain . So far this has been another wonderful page turner for me. I simply love Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, so much so that I have not managed to write about it anywhere…I just haven’t found the words. (I should note here that I had never read any of Hemingway’s work beyond a few excerpts here and there until this one)  The Paris Wife is the fictional perspective of Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, of the same time period. I am just a bit into the book and am delighted thus far.  The author apparently really did her research, learning about the girl and the woman she would become, poring over the letters written between Hemingway and Hadley in order to give her version of Hadley complete authenticity. How talented and skilled is that?!? So far so good with this one…

~Happy March Sunday…I hope it’s a glorious day in your world!~