Alienated America, a New Classics Club List, Avengers, and Happy Mother's Day!

Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse by Timothy P. Carney

Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt by Arthur C. Brooks

Our Towns: A 100,000 Journey Into the Heart of America by James M. and Deborah Fallows

I brought these three books home from the Texas Library Association Conference in Austin last month, and I was immediately captivated, reading them, bookmarking passages that intrigued me, thinking about them, talking about them with others. I felt moved to write a whole blog post on these three books. I'll be posting it next Thursday at What Happened to My America? And How Can We Fix Things? Thoughts about Our Towns, Alienated America, and Love Your Enemies. I'd love to have a conversation with you about these books.

After all that nonfiction last week, I decided to switch genres completely and focus on some fiction. I'm currently reading Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan (for my bookclub which meets this week); Exposed by Jean-Philippe Blonde (a thriller translated from French), and Friday's Tunnel by John Verney (one of my 1001 Children's Books that was recently reissued---to my utter delight). 

I spent a day last week browsing through and organizing lists of books I am interested in reading. (I have these listed under Perpetual Challenges, if you are interested in making your own copy of any of these.) 

The day culminated in the formation of my second Classics Club list. I am quite proud of it. There are fifty books I plan to try to read in the next five years. I have five long books, including The Decameron (554 pages), The Old Curiosity Shop (545 pages), Tom Jones (690 pages), Wives and Daughters (583 pages), and Dickens' Bleak House (800 pages). But most books on my list fall within the very-doable range of 200-400 pages. My list is heavy with adult fiction (20 titles) and children's fiction (11 titles). But I also included science fiction (2), short story collections (4), poetry (2), biographies (1), philosophy (2), folk tales (2), plays (3), mysteries (1), travel (1), and nature (1). My list is posted here. What do you think? Do you see anything on my list that looks good to you? Anything you have read and recommend? Anything you have read and didn't like? I'd love to hear your thoughts here or there.

I was given free tickets (!) so we went to see Avengers this week. My husband and I have never seen any of the popular comic book hero movies that have come out in the past few years, and Bryan at Still an Unfinished Person very helpfully advised us to watch at least the Avengers that came out just before this one. Thank you, Bryan. I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on if I hadn't pulled the earlier Avengers up on Netflix and then had a long conversation with my friend, Lisa, about the characters in the movie during our morning walks this week. 

Now we plan to go back and watch all the earlier movies (Iron Man, Spiderman, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.) Lisa loves them and has DVDs of all of them she is sharing with me.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone! My mom passed away nine years ago, and I still miss her every day. Thank you, moms, for all you do for our world.

How did your week go?

Did you finish any good books?

Have you run across anything book-ish that you would like to share with us?

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