The Sunday Salon: Three Basketball Wins, a Classics Club Spin, and Reading a Book a Day

 

Welcome! We are delighted that you joined us here at the Sunday Salon. 

What is the Sunday Salon? 

The Sunday Salon is a spot to link up and share what we have been doing during the week. It's also a great opportunity to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

With all the snow in East Texas and with schools closed and roads closed, we were not sure we would be able to make it up there, but everything opened back up and we got to visit with our family and see the grandkids play basketball over a long four-day weekend. It even warmed up enough for us to go outside and hang out for a while. 

It was cold and I read a lot last week. I finished seven books - four five-star books and three four-star books. 

What I Read Last Week:

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (Classic)

What Mad Universe by Frederic Brown (Science Fiction)

The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life 

by Frederick Buechner (Spirituality)

Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship 

by Annabel Abbs (Historical Fiction)

The Circuit: The Graphic Novel by Francisco Jiménez (Memoir)

All the Blues in the Sky by Renée Watson (2025 Newbery Winner)

Fireworks written by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Catia Chien (2025 Caldecott Winner)

What I'm Reading Now:

The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Classic)

Native Nations: A Millenium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (History)

Little, Big by John Crowley (Fantasy)

The Classics Club has issued the announcement of the Classics Club’s 43rd CC Spin.

What is the Spin?

It’s easy. At your blog, before next Sunday, February 8th, create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list.

This is your Spin List.

You have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period.

On Sunday, February 8th, The Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by Sunday, March 29th. 

Let's see who can make it the whole way and finish their spin book!

I have a lot of books to read on my latest Classics Club list. Let's see where the needle stops.

So here is my list.

1. Coronado's Children: Tales of Lost Mines and Buried Treasure by J. Frank Dobie

2. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

3. Lost Horizon by James Hilton

4. The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley

5. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson

6. Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies

7. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

8. Brendon Chase by B. B.

9. The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

10. In the Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim

11. Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis

12. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

13. The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

14. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

15. The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

16. In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor

17.  Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

18. Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham

19. A Lost Lady by Willa Cather

20. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 

Have you read any of these?

Do you recommend any of these?

What I Posted Last Week Here at Readerbuzz:

The Sunday Salon: Bookish

Book Covers with Cool Typography

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal: Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

I'm off to a good start with my yearly challenges.

I began to list 3 Good Things every day during the pandemic. Now I've established a regular routine of writing down my 3 Good Things. Here are 3 Good Things from last week:

Good Thing #1:

Wyatt's team won!

Good Thing #2:

Annie's team won!

Good Thing #3:

My son, Jon, is coach of Annie's team,

so he also got a win this weekend.

Weekend linkup spots are listed below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

        

I hope you will join the linkup for Sunday Salon below.

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal: Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

   

Today's Featured Book: 

Native Nations:

A Millennium in North America

by Kathleen DuVal

Genre: History

Published: April 9, 2024

Page Count: 735 pages

Summary: 

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.

A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated.

For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent’s land and resources. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.

In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future.

 

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAY is hosted by Rose City Reader. What book are you happy about reading this week? Please share the opening sentence (or so) on BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAY! Add the link to your blog or social media post and visit other blogs to see what others are reading.

Happy Friday and welcome to the FIRST LINE FRIDAY, hosted by Reading is My Superpower! It’s time to grab the book nearest to you and leave a comment with the first line.

Native North Americans made history for tens of thousands of years before 1492.

DuVal, Kathleen. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, p. 1. Kindle Edition.  

THE FRIDAY 56 is hosted by Anne of Head Full of Books. To play, open a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% on your e-reader). Find a sentence or two and post them, along with the book title and author. Then link up on Head Full of Books and visit others in the linky. 

For the O’odham, it is their himdag, their way of life. Himdag “involves relations between people, the land, and all creation.” People are supposed to share with one another according to what they have, especially the necessities of food and water. Giving away a surplus is an investment. As the Tohono O’odham history textbook Sharing the Desert explains, “This sharing of goods and food then created a debt that was expected to be repaid whenever the others had a surplus….When one family or village helped another, they did so knowing that when they needed help, they would receive it from their neighbors.”[

DuVal, Kathleen. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, p. 56. Kindle Edition.  

I've always been curious about Native Americans. I learned little about them when I was in school. Native Nations won a Pulitzer Prize in 2025. It's a big book of 725 pages, so I will be reading it for a while, but, though I'm just a few chapters in, I'm already learning a lot.

The purpose of THE BOOK BLOGGER HOP is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, and befriend other bloggers. THE BOOK BLOGGER HOP is hosted by Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer.    

What drives you to read books? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee-Addicted Writer)

I do not know. How do you explain this?

Book Covers with Cool Typography

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday That Artsy Reader Girl assigns a topic and then post her top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join her and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.       

The Sunday Salon: Bookish

 

Welcome! I am so glad that you joined us here at the Sunday Salon. Everyone is welcome here.

What is the Sunday Salon? 

The Sunday Salon is a place to link up and share what we have been doing during the week. I hope you will take this great opportunity to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

We are (hopefully) in East Texas this weekend, spending time with our kids and g-kids, watching basketball and playing lots of games together. 

What I Read Last Week:

Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Nonfiction)

By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House #5)

The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Fantasy)

What I'm Reading Now:

The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Classic)

What Mad Universe by Frederic Brown (Science Fiction)

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (Classic)

The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life 

by Frederick Buechner (Spirituality)

What I Posted Last Week Here at Readerbuzz:

The Sunday Salon: What Mad Universe

Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025

The Circuit by Francisco Jiménez:Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

I began to list 3 Good Things every day during the pandemic. Now I've established a regular routine of writing down my 3 Good Things. Here are 3 Good Things from last week:

Good Thing #1:

Masterpiece Theater: Bookish

is a delight.

Good Thing #2:

I will be going to the Texas

Library Association Conference 

in March this year!

Good Thing #3:

We are staying in a cabin

in a vineyard in East Texas

this weekend.

Weekend linkup spots are listed below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

        

I hope you will join the linkup for Sunday Salon below.