In Which I (Finally!) Finish Quo Vadis and We Celebrate 10 Years of Book Club

  

Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Doug Tallamy (Naturalist Book Club) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach ⭐⭐⭐

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Chapter-a-Day Read) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I finally (!) finished Quo Vadis, a story by Nobel-prize winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz. It's set in Nero's Rome, and I slogged through more than half the book, wanting to quit every time I picked it up. And then it suddenly got interesting, and I couldn't stop reading. It was hard to rate a book like that.

If you have any interest in nature, you might want to take a look at Bringing Nature Home and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (though, let's hope, it's not right after you brought it home). Bringing Nature Home is a deep and convincing explanation of why we need more native plants in our yards. Fuzz is a Mary-Roach-look at nature that gets in our way and what we try to do about it and why that never works. 

Bewilderment is another fabulous Richard Powers book about a troubled little boy who undergoes treatment. It's full of the usual Powers brilliance, and it's heavy with his recent environmental focus. And it's, oddly, quite short.

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman (Nonfiction Challenge)...47%

1001 Children's Books You Must Read 

And I'm back to the 1001 Children's Books...along with a little bit of The Guns of August.

We celebrated the 10th year anniversary of our face-to-face book club this week. I made the cake. Don't look too closely. It's my first cake decorating effort.

Thoughts? We saw episode 1. Should we watch on?

Good Thing #1: 

We found a couple of these caterpillars in our garden.

Black Swallowtails!

Good Thing #2: 

We were delighted to see our first monarch in the pollinator garden 

we help maintain in a nearby park.

Good Thing #3:

New binoculars. And a new camera. 

For the swallowtails and the monarchs.

And the birds.

It feels like Christmas.

I'm happy you found your way to the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place for us to link up and to share what we have been doing during the week. It's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

Some of the things we often talk about at the Sunday Salon:

• What was your week like?
• Read any good books? Tell us about them.
• What other bookish things did you do? 
• What else is going on in your life?

Other places where you may like to link up over the weekend are below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

        

My linkup for Sunday Salon is below.