The Sunday Salon: Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, Early Voting, The Great Backyard Bird Count, and More

 

I am delighted 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 have been doing during the week. It's also a great opportunity to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

Valentine's Day. Mardi Gras. Early voting. Beginning of Lent. The Great Backyard Bird Count. Naturalist club meeting. Two book club meetings. Putting in our spring garden.

A busy week at home.

What I Read Last Week:

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

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (Poetry; Classics Club Spin; Black History Month)

This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page (Fiction)

Vigil by George Saunders (Fiction)

Profiles in Ignorance: How American's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber by Andy Borowitz (Nonfiction)

What I'm Reading Now:

The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Classic)

Caraval by Stephanie Garber (Fantasy)

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations by Frederick Buechner (Spirituality)

What I Posted Last Week Here at Readerbuzz:

The Sunday Salon: Happy Valentine's Day!

Books for Armchair Travelers

Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber by Andy Borowitz: 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:

I voted.

Good Thing #2:

I cooked for Valentine's Day.

Manicotti and Italian Wedding Soup.

Good Thing #3:

I spent hours watching birds

last week during the Great Backyard Bird Count.

I saw or heard 56 species in my backyard

over the four-day event, including 

this Cooper's Hawk, who wildly flew at

some of the small birds around my feeders,

missing them all.

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.

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes: Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

Today's Featured Book: 

The Weary Blues

by Langston Hughes

Genre: Poetry

Published: 1926

Page Count: 98 pages

Summary: 

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes is a landmark collection of poetry and one of the defining works of the Harlem Renaissance. First published in 1926, this volume introduced Hughes as a major American poet and gave voice to Black urban life with a style that blended lyric poetry, blues rhythm, jazz cadence, and everyday speech.

 

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 WEARY BLUES  

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,  

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,  

I heard a Negro play.  

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night  

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light  

He did a lazy sway....  

He did a lazy sway....  

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues... 

Langston Hughes. The Weary Blues, 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. 

POEM  (To F. S.) 

I loved my friend.  

He went away from me.  

There’s nothing more to say.  

The poem ends,  

Soft as it began,—  

I loved my friend. 

Langston Hughes. The Weary Blues, p. 92. Kindle Edition. 

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes is a perfect book for me to read in February as a celebration of Black History Month. All my favorite Langston Hughes poems---"Dream Variations," "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Harlem Night Song," "The Dream Keeper," "Epilogue," "Mother to Son," and "Poem"---are in this volume. We used a couple of these for kids to recite during Poem in a Pocket Day at school. I also used to have my second graders memorize "Poem."

The Weary Blues is on my Classics Club list, and it also qualifies as a book published one hundred years ago for several challenges. 

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.    

How do you feel about the current state of romance novels? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee-Addicted Writer)

I'm old school, but I'd be happier if my characters weren't so potty-mouthed these days, and if the bedroom door was kept closed. 

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?

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

Today's Featured Book: 

The Circuit

by Francisco Jiménez

Genre: Graphic Novel; Memoir; Children's Book

Published: 2024

Page Count: 233 pages

Summary: 

An honest and evocative account of a family’s journey from Mexico to the fields of California—and to a life of backbreaking work and constant household moves—as seen through the eyes of a boy who longs for education and the right to call one place home.

 

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 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. 

The Circuit is a graphic novel made from a book of short stories about the life of the author, Francisco Jiménez. When he was a boy, his parents decided to come to the United States for a better life. The family worked as day laborers on farms in California, moving from cotton fields to strawberry fields to fields of grapes, moving from tents to shacks to tenant houses, moving from school to school.

I've wanted to read this book for years, and what better time than now to learn about the life of an immigrant?

Now that I have read the graphic novel of this memoir, I plan to go ahead and read the author's original book and the sequels.

Jennifer of Introverted Jen is sponsoring the 2026 Immigration Reading Challenge. Jennifer notes, 'I firmly believe that a little empathy and understanding can help us put aside our differences, stop seeing people as “other” or “less than,” and find common ground and ways to live together peacefully.' You can find a list of books you might consider reading for the challenge here, and you can join in the challenge yourself here.

#2026immigrationreading

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.    

Do you struggle to start a new read after finishing a truly amazing one? (submitted by Elizabeth @ Silver's Reviews)

Yes! Do you?