Transmissions from the Northern Outpost

Tag: The Sunday Salon

  • Ah, poetry!

    I think I’m going to have to give up on Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor as being my first book that I’ll read this year. Instead, today I’m turning to poetry. About an hour and a half ago, I went to Libby to pick out some possibilities. I have about half a dozen choices. I’ll let you know next week what I chose.

    As for the rest of the year, I have three books I want to finish before its end:

    1. Candide by Voltaire
    2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
    3. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

    The first is because two different friends recommended and at the end of the book is the inspiration in part for this blog: to cultivate my garden figuratively. The second is one that my wife has been trying to get me to read for a while, plus another friend. My wife and I are also playing quid pro quo with my reading this before the end of the year and her reading Bruce Springsteen’s biography Born to Run. The third is a reread for me, from a course on O’Connor and William Faulkner that I had in college.

    What are you currently reading or what is on your radar for this year to read?

    This is part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz.

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  • Circling back to The Sunday Salon

    With this, the fifth post of my new blog, I am rejoining The Sunday Salon, a book blogging meme I’ve been in and out of over my 20 years of blogging.

    The Sunday Salon was set up in 2007 by Debra Hamel. It “began life as a means of giving myself and a few friends an excuse to read and blog every Sunday, ” she says, and then was opened up to the public, and how I became a member shortly after that. Eventually it grew so large that she had to limit its members and she moved it to Yahoo Pipes for a short time.

    In 2019, Hamel passed the baton to another Deb,  a book blogger and retired school librarian from Texas, Deb Nance. In 2020, during the pandemic, Nance began listing three good things daily, a practice that now has spilled over into her Sunday Salon post each weekend. And it also cascaded on to inspire me to start my own meme, 3 Good Things Thursday, on previous blog and now on this blog too. So now, full circle.

    In future Sunday Salon posts, I will write more on what I’ve read, what I’m reading, and what I plan to read. I might not always use a Sunday Salon button. I might only mention in a single line at the bottom of the post with a link to Deb’s blog. For today, I’ll just give a quick update on my planned first book of the year (for the second year in a row), Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. Not surprisingly, like me, still unfinished.

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