Back from the Texas Book Festival!

 

I'm back from a weekend at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. It's the first time the book festival has been held in person in three years. We had a fantastic time. I plan to post about it in a few weeks. 

It's November, and 

it's nothing but nonfiction.

Bake: My Best Ever Recipes for the Classics by Paul Hollywood 🐝🐝🐝🐝

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl 🐝🐝🐝🐝

Schott's Miscellany by Ben Schott 🐝🐝🐝🐝

Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books by Cathy Rentzenbrink 🐝🐝🐝🐝

Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck (Nonfiction)

The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet by Jim Robbins (Nonfiction)

Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway (Nonfiction)

Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay (Nonfiction)

Last week I posted here at Readerbuzz:

Wordless Wednesday: A Month of Thankfulness

Series I'd Like to Start / Catch Up On / Finish

Nonfiction November: Book Pairing

Sunday Salon: Birthday Celebrations!

I'm reading and reviewing 

as fast as I can.

So far I've read and reviewed 

49 out of 281 fiction picture books and board books.

Good Thing #1

It was a stunningly beautiful day in Austin 

for the Texas Book Festival, 

and there were lots and lots of people attending.

Good Thing #2

I volunteered on Saturday in the Read to Me Tent.

I loved hearing all the picture book authors and illustrators,

especially Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett.

Good Thing #3

Janet Evanovich!

I'm happy you joined us here at the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place 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. 

A Month of Thankfulness

When Covid reduced my world, I was determined to keep my head together, and so I started my daily Three Good Things list. And, each week, I took my daily lists and made a Three Good Things list to post on my Sunday Salon post.

For November, I have decided to post Three Good Things from this past year each week for A Month of Thankfulness.

I had lots of Good Things in nature this year...

Rural France...

My first Northern Parula at Quintana Bird Observatory...

My first Orange Sulphur...

A great photo of an Eastern Giant Swallowtail...

Sapphire hunting in Montana...

My first Pipevine Swallowtail...

My first Wood Duck...

A beautiful Queen...

A lovely Gulf Fritillary...

A gorgeous Ceraunus Blue...

Finding fossils in Montana...

Thanks by W. S. Merwin:

"Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you..."

For more photos, link up at Wordless Wednesday, Comedy Plus, Messymimi's Meanderings, Keith's Ramblings, Create With Joy, Amanda's Books and More, and My Corner of the World.

Series I’d Like to Start/Catch up on/Finish

Series I'd Like to Read More Of

(numbers in parentheses are the number I still need to read)

Anne of Green Gables series (19/20)

A Wrinkle in Time series (3/4)

Corfu books by Gerald Durrell (1/3)

Discworld by Terry Pratchett (33/41)

Lonesome Dove series (3/4)

Wizard of Earthsea (2/3)

The Once and Future King (4/5)

A Series of Unfortunate Events (16/17)

Gilead quartet (1/4)

Series I'd Like to Try But I Haven't Tried Yet

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas

Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

The Seven Realms by Cinda Williams Chima

Caraval by Stephanie Garber

The Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

The Selection by Kiera Class

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

What do you recommend??

List of series

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 2022: Book Pairing

 

Week 2: (November 7-11) – Book Pairing: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or another nonfiction!). It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story. Or pair a book with a podcast, film or documentary, TV show, etc. on the same topic or stories that pair together. (Rennie at What's Nonfiction)

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or another nonfiction!)

I would pair Studs Terkel's Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, a nonfiction book of interviews with master journalist Studs Terell and those who experienced the Great Depression, with Kristin Hannah's fiction book, The Four Winds. You might also consider reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Birthday Celebrations!

 

This week was my birthday. 

I dreamed of getting a book for my birthday. I got fifteen!

My son and his wife sent me Adrift: American in 100 Charts and 50 French Phrases. My husband brought me Bake by Paul Hollywood and Say It Right in French. My sister gave me The Encyclopedia of Cookies: Over 500 Tasty Recipes for Cookie Lovers of All Ages and Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook. 

Wow!

My Birthday Book Club gave me Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure; The Book of Books: Recommended Reading; The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka; The Margery Sharp Collection: The Martha Novels; The Book of the Dun Cow; A Passion for Books: A Book Lovers' Treasury; and Wool by Hugh Howey. 

Yes, wow!

To finish my birthday celebration, I'm in Austin this weekend at the Texas Book Festival!

Last week I posted here at Readerbuzz:

100 Years of Popular Books on Goodreads

Unlikable Characters We Love and Hate

Nonfiction November: Your Year in Nonfiction

Sunday Salon: Birthdays!

Nonfiction November has begun!

I've decided to read only nonfiction this month.

My granddaughter, Annie, had a wonderful 7th birthday.

She had a painting party at the park.

Good Thing #1

Pumpkin carving with Annie and Wyatt

Good Thing #2

Annie and Wyatt loved the bubble machine

we checked out from our library.

Good Thing #3

Annie's dad helped her put together the Legos 

she got for her birthday.

I'm happy you joined us here at the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place 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. 

100 Years of Popular Books on Goodreads

From Goodreads:

"This is a fun one: For the collection below, we decided to take a long-arc overview and try to identify the most popular books published over the past 100 years, as determined by Goodreads members' digital shelves. To do this, we went year by year and picked one title from among the top of each pile.
 
However, we didn’t always just grab the very top book for several reasons. Repeats, for instance (some entire eras are Very Stephen King). And some years saw multiple Very, Very Important Works published. Ah, the backstage agony of debating the relative merits of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka!

Mostly we wanted to curate a list that would cover a range of genres and suggest the breadth of reading interests over time. And OK, full confession, it tickled our fancy to be able to put Ulysses and Malibu Rising on the same list."

Thank you to Sheree at Keeping Up With the Penguins for this list. 

Highlighted yellow books are the ones I've read; aqua are books on my TBR; green books I attempted but never finished. If I've reviewed it, the title is hyperlinked.

1922: Ulysses by James Joyce
1923: The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
1924: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
1925: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1926: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
1927: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
1928: The Well Of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
1929: Passing by Nella Larsen
1930: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
1931: The Joy Of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer
1932: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1933: In Praise Of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
1934: Murder On The Orient Express by Agatha Christie
1935: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
1936: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
1938: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
1939: The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1940: Native Son by Richard Wright
1941: The Library Of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
1942: The Stranger by Albert Camus
1943: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1944: Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
1945: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
1946: The Member Of The Wedding by Carson McCullers
1947: No Exit by Jean Paul-Sartre
1948: I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
1949: 1984 by George Orwell
1950: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
1951: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
1952: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1953: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1954: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
1955: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1956: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
1957: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
1958: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
1959: The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
1960: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1961: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
1962: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
1963: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
1964: Charlie And The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
1965: Dune by Frank Herbert
1966: Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
1967: One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
1968: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
1969: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
1970: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
1971: Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
1972: Ways Of Seeing by John Berger
1973: The Princess Bride by William Goldman
1974: Carrie by Stephen King
1975: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
1976: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
1977: Song Of Solomon by Toni Morrison
1978: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
1979: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
1980: The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco
1981: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
1982: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1983: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
1984: The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
1985: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
1986: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
1987: Watchmen by Alan Moore
1988: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
1989: The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
1990: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
1991: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
1992: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
1993: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
1994: The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
1995: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
1996: A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
1997: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
1998: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
1999: Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
2000: House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielwski
2001: The Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
2002: Coraline by Neil Gaiman
2003: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
2004: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2005: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
2006: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2007: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
2008: The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
2009: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2010: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
2011: The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller

2012: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
2013: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
2014: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
2015: Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
2016: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
2017: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
2018: Educated by Tara Westover
2019: Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
2020: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
2021: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

65/100

Unlikable Characters We Hate and Love

Anna Karenina from Anna Karenina

Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby

Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

Eleanor Oliphant in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis

The Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

Olive Kitteridge in Olive Kitteridge

Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind

Severus Snape from Harry Potter

Undine Spragg in Custom of the Country

Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman

Gollum in Lord of the Rings

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.