Sunday Salon

This week I'm taking it easy after a long morning choir practice --we're getting ready for Easter, so will be having long practices on Sundays after early Mass when everybody's in town.  When  I get home, I'll have a leisurely breakfast (I'm thinking croissants, Canadian bacon, poached eggs and cantalope), and then settle down for some cross-stitch avec audio book, and then some reading.

It's been a good reading week, although I've not finished too many.  Two that I have finished are The Singer's Gun by Emily  St John Mandel and The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron.  I'm going to post the review for the Mandel book  for the The Spotlight series being hosted by Aarti at Booklust.  It was a fun read, so stay tuned for this one.

The Poacher's Son is an outstanding debut work by a fellow Mainer, Paul Doiron, who just happens to be the editor of DownEast Magazine.  This one is a winner, so look for it when it pubs in May.  In the meantime, we have a lively discussion going on at the Barnes and Noble First Look club, so I don't want to get ahead of the group  with a posted review.  We'll wrap up by Easter, so I'll post in mid to late March.

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Then I've been plugging away at the Lenten Reading pile. I browsed (fairly intensely) through  Rome Has Spoken, a book I'd started years ago, and periodically picked up. I finally got it finished.  The subtitle really says  it all:  A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements and How they Have Changed Through the Centuries.
It's a very academic but interesting volume reviewing various "issues" that seem to have been interpreted and enforced differently over the two centuries of Roman Catholicism. The topics cover the range from evolution to the slavery, from Galileo to usury, and include the current buzz topics of contraception, women's ordination and divorce.  It's not recreational reading but it's been personally enriching.
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So what's up for this week? 

I'm listening to Al Roker's Morning Show Murders- it's a slow starter, but I'm not ready for any intense audios right now. Roker reads his own work and it's an easy listen while I'm stitching.

I'm still plowing through Merton, and I started two new books---very different, but both really good:
The Woman Who Named God is one I won in a contest last year.  Although it's different from what I expected, (for some reason I thought it was fiction and it's not), I'm really impressed with the first 50 pages I've read.  It is not a quick read, but neither is it ponderous.
 
I was so enchanted with the Leighton Gage's Inspector Silva book that I read last month (Buried Strangers) that I got the first book in the series (Blood of the Wicked) from the library this week, and dove right in.  If anything, it's better than the other one.

And finally I need to get started on one of my LT Early Review books --Lake Magic by Kimberly Fiske since I just found out I was selected for another: Man from Saigon by  Marti Leimbach.  So Sunday's Salon looks to be a wonderful one.