Sunday Salon - August 18

Summer isn't officially over for about another month but the kids in all of the school districts around here started back to school this week. That always makes it feel like summer is over, official or otherwise. Except at my house where, for the first time in 18 years, we didn't have any kids heading back to public schools. Wow, was that strange. That's not to say we haven't been making back-to-school preparations. Both of the boys start back to college tomorrow; Miss H has another couple of weeks.

It's been that same length of time since I had to be to work at a specific time. Since I started my new job, I've been starting work at 8 a.m. which has meant I'm battling all of the traffic that has just dropped off kids at school. This week I start a new schedule, a schedule designed to help me keep my sanity but which may cut into my reading time. I'll work an extra hour four days a week, getting me to work ahead of the traffic and also giving me a half day off one day a week. I'm really looking forward to that half day. I'm thinking I'll really be able to get some big projects done on those days...or have a nice long chunk of reading time uninterrupted. Hmm, maybe this won't cut into my reading after all.

I went way out of my reading comfort zone this week, reading Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. Let's just say, for know, that I found it interesting and I'm sure it's one that my oldest will enjoy. It will pass to his hands next. Followed that with Karen White's Falling Home which felt like I was eating comfort food or slipping into a favorite pair of slippers. I like to stretch my boundaries with my reading choices but it always feels good to fall back on women's fiction.

With all of that talk about cutting back on books I'm accepting for review, somehow I still managed to have four new books arrive at my house this week. This does not bode well for my efforts to get through all of my review books by the end of the year.

With Mini-him moving back home recently, we have been working hard on finding space for all of the things we'll have to store until he's ready to move out again. It's been a great incentive to clean out and purge. Today I managed to convince The Big Guy to get rid of the last of the textbooks he's been holding onto...for twenty-five years! I also got rid of a dozen books I've been holding onto for a long time. There are still more books to go through but I'm not sure how far I can push The Big Guy to get rid of any more for a while. Purging books was a topic of conversation on Twitter last week; how do you decide which books to keep and which to get rid of?

This week I've got reviews of Lynn Griffin's Sea Escape, an new adaptation of Snow White, and Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. This week I'll start The Baker's Daughter, by Sarah McCoy, for a TLC book tour. What are you reading this week?