The Sunday Salon: My First Butterfly

  

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

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. 

I hate, hate, hate admitting it, but I have decided to give up on A Tale of Two Cities, at least for now. I did everything I usually do to make my way through a book---read chapter summaries, read a kid version, read a comic book---but nothing was helping. 

I read A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and learned so much about the conflict that has been going on for so long in the Middle East, but reading this serious and important book took a lot out of me, and, with all the rest of the insanity going on around us in the US these days, I had to set aside Seek a Kind Person and There is No Place for Us for right now and find some reading that is more consoling.

What I Read Last Week:

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall

Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius by Ryan Holiday

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

What I'm Reading Now:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Chapter-a-Day)

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty (Book Club)

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (Nonfiction)

Sanditon by Jane Austen (Classic)

What are you reading right now that you are enjoying?

What I Posted Last Week Here at Readerbuzz:

The Names by Florence Knapp: Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

The Houston Bookstore Crawl 2025: Candescent Books

Best "On the Road" Books

The Sunday Salon: The Library Hotel, The Lion King, the New York Public Library, and The Strand Bookstore

The idea behind this reading challenge is simple: Use the ease of summer to tackle a Big Book (400+ pages) or two or ... however many you want! You set your own goals. And if it is the start of winter where you live, then it's your Big Book Winter Challenge. Everyone is welcome to participate. The Big Book Summer Challenge is hosted by Sue at Book by Book.

The Details:
Hey, it's summer, so we'll keep this low-key and easy!

• Anything 400 pages or more qualifies as a big book.
• The challenge runs from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend (May 23 this year) through Labor Day (September 1 this year).
  
• Choose one or two or however many big books you want as your goal. Wait, did you get that?  You only need to read 1 book with 400+ pages this summer to participate! (though you are welcome to read more, if you want).
• No sign-ups are necessary! All readers are welcome to participate.
• If you are a blogger or YouTuber and want to share your Big Book Summer plans, book reviews, or wrap-ups, you can add your link(s) to the links list here so others can find you. 
• Join the 2025 Big Book Summer Goodreads group to enjoy Big Book discussions all summer long! We always have a lively group with lots of fun book chat. Or if you prefer, join the Big Book Summer Storygraph group.
• For chatting on other social media platforms, use #BigBookSummer
  

That's it!  Go check out your shelves and your TBR list for chunksters and get started!

What kind of books "count"? All kinds! Middle-grade, YA, graphic novels, classics, all genres, all types--as long as they are at least 400 pages. Yes, e-books and audio books count, too--just check online for the number of pages in the print edition.  

My potential reads:

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - 964 pages
• The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang - 545 pages 
• Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty - 505 pages
• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 - 955 pages
• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 474 pages
• Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome - 548 pages
• Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - 400 pages
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser - 557 pages
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - 590 pages

 

 

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:

Egg. Caterpillar. Pupa. Adult Butterfly. 

I enjoyed watching 

the development of a Painted Lady butterfly

over twenty days.

Good Thing #2:

One of a pair of Mississippi Kites

in our Live Oak tree this week.

Good Thing #3:

Eating fresh green beans (friend's garden),

tomatoes (ours), kale (ours), cucumbers (ours),

and peppers (ours). 

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 Names by Florence Knapp: Book Beginnings on Fridays, First Line Friday, The Friday 56, and Book Blogger Hop

Today's Featured Book: 

The Names

by Florence Knapp

Genre: Fiction

Published: May 6, 2025

Page Count: 336 pages

Summary: 

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

 

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.

Cora's mother always used to say children were whipped up by the wind, that even the quiet ones would come in after playtime made wild by it. Cora feels it in herself now, that restlessness...Because tomorrow---if morning comes, if the storm stops raging---Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps and this is her real concern, she'll formalize who he will become. 

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. 

As the weeks passed, the bruise covering one side of Cora's face worked its way through a petrol puddle of colors until finally it paled to yellow, then faded into her skin.

The Names begins on the day Cora goes to register the official name of her newborn son. From this point the story branches out into three stories: one in which Cora chooses the name her abusive husband demands, one in which Cora selects a name of her own choosing, and one in which Cora defies her husband and picks a name she hopes will inspire her son to be his own person. 

And the story builds from these three branches in seven-year-increments, from the consequences of the naming.

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.    

May 23rd - 29th - A songwriter composes a song about your love for books. What would the song's title be? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)

"Books---I Will Always Love You"

 

The Houston Bookstore Crawl 2025: Candescent Books

I was delighted to participate in the Second Annual Houston Bookstore Crawl #HTXBookCrawl25 in April. Here is a map I made of the twenty-five indie bookstores in the Houston area.

How it worked: I picked up a crawl card at Then & Now Bookstore in Galveston, one of the 25 participating stores. I got my card stamped or signed by each of the stores I visited through the end of April. Once I visited 10, I submitted my card to any of the participating bookstores to be entered into a raffle for gifts. Every store I hit after the first 10 counts as an additional entry. The cards had to be turned in by the end of business on April 30.

April 26 was Indie Bookstore Day, and indie bookstores all over the US hosted events. Take a look at the map here to see what events were held in April.

Say hello to the Participating Bookstores:

Basket Books & Art · Blue Willow Bookshop · Books Abound · The Book Attic · Books by the Bay · The Book Readers Venue · Brazos Bookstore · Buy the Book · Candescent Books · CLASS Bookstore · Copperfield's Books · Dreamers Books + Culture · Good Books in the Woods · Good on Paper Books and Stationery · Gulf Coast Cosmos Comics · Houston Book Warehouse · Kaboom Books · Katy Budget Books · Kindred Stories · LIT bookbar · LIT Java Coffee & Books · Mossrose Bookshop · Murder by The Book · Then & Now Bookshop · Village Books

I visited twelve bookstores in April. 

Here was my third bookstore:

Candescent Books is a Black and woman-owned pop-up bookstore, founded by a reader who aims to build community around the infinite worlds and experiences created by fiction books and book-ish candles. I visited Candescent Books during a weekend in which it was at Native Coffee near downtown Houston.

Candescent Books

@Candescentbooks

Open Saturday and Sunday 

at various locations around Houston

The week I visited the bookstore was open in the corner of a neighborhood coffeeshop.

The owner was friendly and helpful.

Here's what I bought!

Best "On the Road" Books

I love to take off on the road via a book. Here are some of the best road trips I have taken. If you have favorites, I'd love to hear about them.

Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon (Nonfiction)

William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map -- if they get on at all -- only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Fiction)

The Pulitzer Prize­–winning classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier and rich with complex characters, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (Fiction)

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.

The Roads to Sata: A 2,000 Mile Walk Through Japan by Alan Booth (Nonfiction)

One sunny spring morning in the 1970s, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across the entire length of Japan. Travelling only along small back roads, Alan Booth travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the extreme south, traversing three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. His mission: 'to come to grips with the business of living here,' after having spent most of his adult life in Tokyo. The Roads to Sata is a wry, witty, inimitable account of that prodigious trek, vividly revealing the reality of life in off-the-tourist-track Japan

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Fiction)

Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.

Census by Jesse Ball (Fiction)

When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn’t have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son—a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son. 

 

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France by Kermit Lynch (Nonfiction)

“Wine is, above all, about pleasure. Those who make it ponderous make it dull . . . If you keep an open mind and take each wine on its own terms, there is a world of magic to discover.” So wrote the renowned wine expert Kermit Lynch in the introduction to Adventures on the Wine Route, his ultimate tour of France, especially its wine cellars. The “magic” of wine is Lynch’s subject as he takes the reader on a singular journey through the Loire, Bordeaux, the Languedoc, Provence, northern and southern Rhone, and Burgundy. In Adventures on the Wine Route, the wine lover will find wisdom without a trace of pretension and hype.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Fiction)

It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien.

After that, things get much, much worse.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Fiction)

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig (Nonfiction-ish)

A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live.

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.    

The Sunday Salon: The Library Hotel, The Lion King, the New York Public Library, and The Strand Bookstore

  

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

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. 

Last week was a dream of delights in NYC. We stayed at the Library Hotel, went to the New York Public Library, saw The Lion King on Broadway, and visited the Strand Bookstore. I feel like I should do a post on each of these, especially the Library Hotel, which I heartily recommend. 

What did I love most? All those wonderful conversations we had with our fellow guests at the hotel, taxi drivers, people at the theater, customers at the bookstores, people on the plane.

What I Read Last Week:

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz (Nonfiction)

What I'm Reading Now:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Reread)

When Cathy of 746 books announced last year that she would not host 20 Books of Summer this year after ten successful years, Emma of Words and Peace and Annabel of AnnaBookBel both volunteered to take it on. Summer reading IS the 20, 15 or 10 Books challenge to all of us! They couldn’t let Cathy’s wonderful challenge fall by the wayside.

So this is the first call to start planning…

• The #20BooksofSummer2025 challenge runs from Sunday June 1st to Sunday August 31st
• The first rule of 20 Books is that there are no real rules, other than signing up for 10, 15, or 20 books and trying to read from your TBR.
• Pick your list in advance, or nominate a bookcase to read from, or pick at whim from your TBR.
• If you do pick a list, you can change it at any time – swap books in/out.
• Don’t get panicked at not reaching your target.
• Just enjoy a summer of great reading and make a bit of space on your shelves!

They’ll have monthly summary posts where you can add progress reports and recommendations. The final one at the at the beginning of September will stay open for a while to catch all the last reviews.

Emma designed some new logos, and for the first time they’ve done one specially for our Antipodean friends for whom it is winter rather than summer. Resize them to fit your needs. Emma has also made a book bingo card to match your reads for more fun, too.

If you’re planning to join in please do add your blog / planning post link to the Mr Linky here, which’ll help us keep track, and you can use the hashtag #20BooksofSummer2025 on your socials.

Here are my (planned, but subject to change) 20 Books of Summer:

James by Percival Everett.     The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. 

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.    Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang.    Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt.    Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor.    Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie.

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton.    Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.     The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger.

A Bakery in Paris by Aimee K. Runyan.     How to Live by Judith Valente.

Bake Happy by Judith Fertig.   Sanditon by Jane Austen.

Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.     Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome.

What I Posted Last Week Here at Readerbuzz:

The Sunday Salon: New York!

The Houston Bookstore Crawl 2025: Mossrose Bookshop

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans: 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:

The Reading Room of

the Library Hotel.

Good Thing #2:

The New York Public Library.

Good Thing #3:

The Lion King.

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.