The Sunday Salon: It's My Birthday!

 

I am glad that you joined us here at the Sunday Salon. Welcome! 

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

It's my 69th birthday on November 1st! I'm delighted to be healthy and happy and to have family and friends both in real life and here online! 

We had a blowout in Houston on the way to East Texas last week. And, yes, it began to pour down rain, and, yes, the spare was dry-rotted, but we managed to find a place to get a new tire, and we popped into the wonderful Arandas Bakery next door while we waited. I decided this is the perfect birthday cake for me!

What I Read Last Week:

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah (Book Club)

Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford (Fiction)

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Children's Fiction)

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, 

and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Evan (Nonfiction)

What I'm Reading Now:

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and a Medical Miracle by Rachel Clarke

Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right

and Its Historic Consequences by Joan Biskupik

Butterflies of Houston and Southeast Texas by John L. Tveten

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Nonfiction November has begun! 

What nonfiction did you read in 2025? What nonfiction did you like best? What are your favorite types of nonfiction to read? 

The first week's writing prompts are hosted by Heather at Based on a True Story. I hope you will join in!

What I Posted Last Week Here at Readerbuzz:

The Sunday Salon: My (Hopefully!) Last Hyper-Busy Week for a While

Nonfiction November 2025: My Year in Nonfiction

The Scariest-Spookiest-Creepiest-Bleakest Books I've Ever Read to the End

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan: 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, and 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:

I love my Aqua Zumba class in the spring 

and summer and fall, but do I have what it takes to 

swim outdoors in the winter?

I did it---outdoor temperature: 49 degrees.

Good Thing #2:

My aunt found the fudge recipe

she used when I was little...

on the back of a comic book.

Good Thing #3:

I'm getting ready for our Thanksgiving trip to Chicago

by borrowing a friend's red wool cape.

I like it so much I think I might

see if I can buy it from her.

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.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan: Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

Today's Featured Book: 

A Fever in the Heartland:

The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America,

and the Woman Who Stopped Them

by Timothy Egan

Genre: History

Published: April 4, 2023

Page Count: 428 pages

Summary: 

The Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

 

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.

The most powerful man in Indiana stood next to the new governor at the Inaugural Ball, there to be thanked, applauded, and blessed for using the nation's oldest domestic terror group to gain control of a uniquely American state. 

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. 

Now, the city attorney, four members of the town council, the chief of the fire department and the school superintendent were all Klan....Where did this all come from? What had calloused the character of so many of Stern's neighbors? What did they want? As W.E.B. Du Bois had written, behind "the yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim, lynch, and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something." Noblesville had just a few dozen Black residents, a mere ninety-four Catholics, and no Jews or recent immigrants as far as anyone could tell....The menace, as the preacher said, was just beyond the reassuring predictability of the town, somewhere in the urban churn and the moral flexibility of the Jazz Age. And those alien forces were closing in on the Noblesvilles of America.

Everyone needs to read this book.

A Fever in the Heartland follows the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the heartland of America during the 1920s, a movement that centered on hatred of Blacks, Catholics, and Jews, resulting in a gangster-like organization that bullied and beat up and killed people in order to concentrate power and money in the hands of a few. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan was led by a charismatic charlatan, D. C. Stephenson, who lied, never paid what he owed, and sexually abused scores of women. He gathered around him many people who he could bribe or scheme to do his will. And common people, wooed by his charm, came in droves to join the Klan.

Stephenson wanted to be president. He would not be president, he later revealed, but a dictator.

I cringed as I read about the thefts, the beatings, the murders of innocent people, about the lives destroyed, about the atmosphere of hatred that prevailed, about the way democracy was almost ousted, replaced by Klan rule.

Everyone needs to read this book.

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.    

October 31st - Have you ever been haunted by a book's plot or a character? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)

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. 

Yes. Often. 

I often think about Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and the central character, preacher John Ames, 76, who is dying and is writing a letter to his young son about all the meaningful things he wishes he could to talk about one day with his son. I often think about The Count of Monte Cristo and the character of Edmond Dantès, a highly-regarded young man who has everything stripped from him, who plots revenge on those who wronged him, revenge he feels he will never live to carry out. I often think about the loneliness of the four women who go to stay for a month in Italy in a castle in The Enchanted April and how the companionship of the stay changes all four for the better. I often think of the life of O-lan, a poor woman who works incredibly hard with her poor husband in The Good Earth, and who sacrifices to bring her husband great wealth, but who is abandoned by him for other women and other distractions...

So, yes, many books and their characters haunt me.

 

The Scariest-Spookiest-Creepiest-Bleakest Books I've Ever Read to the End

I'm not a scary book person. Nope.

Scary books give me bad dreams. Ugh.

I don't like things that make my skin crawl. 'Fraid not.

But I've been talked into reading several scary, spooky, dark, bleak, depressing, and creepy books at times in my life. 

Here are the scariest books I've ever read.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Night by Elie Wiesel

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician August 6-September 30, 1945 by Michihiko Hachiya

Nothing by Janne Teller

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

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.     

Nonfiction November 2025: My Year in Nonfiction

 

Week 1 (10/27-11/2) Your Year in Nonfiction: Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more?  What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? (Hosted by Heather at Based on a True Story.)

What books have you read?

I've read 94 nonfiction books out of a total of 251 books. That's 37%.

That's a little less than last year, but this year I read a lot of big nonfiction books, a couple of which were over 900 pages.

What were your favorites?

My Favorite Nonfiction of 2025:

Team of Rivals: 

The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln 

by Doris Kearns Goodwin 

The Day the World Came to Town: 

9/11 in Gander Newfoundland 

by Jim DeFede

Pleased to Meet Me: 

Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are 

by Bill Sullivan

Hiroshima Diary:

The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945

by Michihiko Hachiya

I Contain Multitudes:

The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

by Ed Yong

Finger Exercises for Poets

by Dorianne Laux

The Backyard Bird Chronicles

by Amy Tan

Postwar: 

A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Raising Hare: 

A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: 

Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

by Nathan Thrall

I also enjoyed these books of nonfiction for children: How to Write a Poem by Kwame Alexander; The Scraps Book by Lois Ehlert; Turtle Watch by George Ancona; The Universe in You (or anything by this author!) by Jason Chin; Slow Down and Be Here Now by Laura Brand; The Little Book of Little Activists; and Growing Green: A First Book of Gardening by Daniela Sosa.

Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more?

I've read a lot of books in 2025 about books and writing; happiness; nature, especially birds; Paris; baking; and history. I'm always on the lookout for more good books about these topics.

What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I hope to find more good nonfiction. I hope you will share your favorites with me.