Sunday Salon -- August 16, 2026

 

Sorority Sisters: Anne Marie, Me, Mary Ann, Chris, Sandy

Weather: Lovely summer weather with tinges of odors of forest fire smoke every once in a while.😕

Sisterhood: I met with four of my sorority sisters for a good chat and dinner early last week at Anne Marie's home. It was amazing how we could all pick up where we left off forty-five years ago. Sisters forever.

Ian and his Auntie wearing silly rally "hats" trying to urge team onto victory. (It didn't work.)

First Mariners baseball game: Ian went to his major league baseball game in Seattle last Friday to be part of the crowd celebrating the 50th season of the Mariners team. He almost caught a flyball, ate pizza, bought a baseball from the club store, and got to watch a home run derby after the game was over which involved eight retired Mariners, including Ichiro! After riding the link train back to the park-n-ride and driving home we didn't get back until 1 AM. Pretty late for all of us but especially for an eight-year-old boy.

Slow-mo: Since getting back from Oregon two weeks ago I've been pretty much on slow-mo. The only things I've had to do is go to appointments and then the rest of the days have been filled in with reading, blogging, and watching TV. We are finally caught up on back episode of Ninja Warrior and AGT. The above video is of our dog and his is reaction to a dog trick on AGT. The rest of the time he was ignoring the TV.

Reading (since my last update):

• Completed:
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• Currently reading: 
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• Blogging:

• TTT: Inspiring Books with Uninspiring Covers
• Review: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
• Six-Degrees: LAND
• Classics Club Spin #45, announcement is Sunday (today)
• TTT: Books I was reading on this day for the past ten years
• Review: Land by Maggie O'Farrell
• Reviews: The Warmth of Other Suns and Last Summer on State Street

Cybils Book Award closes: Sadly I read that the Cybils (Children's and Young Adult Book Lovers' Literary Awards) Board decided that it was time to cease to exist. I was a Cybils judge for several years --mostly reading MG and YA nonfiction, and I loved it and took a lot of pride in doing it. The board cited among two reasons that it was time to fold. First that is difficult to find dedicated judges and secondly they had trouble getting preview copies from publishers. I understand the first reason. There were so many categories when one factors in all the category classifications from pre-readers up to high school. I bet it was tough to fill all the judging slots. The second reason, one would think that publishers would want people to read and review their books but I bet it was a huge job to ask them to send preview copies to each of the judges for their books. Sigh. I wasn't a board member so I can't even begin to understand the task that those folks, probably volunteers, went through each year to pull off the awards. But I always thought the process was more open than it should have been: Publishers didn't have a limit on how many books they could submit and nominations by members were accepted for books not even read by the nominators. Because of this some categories, like YA fiction, would end up with over 150 titles included. What judge has the time to run down and read that many books in the 2 month time frame? Goodbye Cybils! I will miss you.

OMG: I had a dickens of time this week adding images (photos) to the post. The two photos were texted to me from others' phones. When I sent to them to my computer I couldn't add them to the post because they had a .heic file type instead of .jpg. I tried and tried to save them in the other format. Eventually my husband had to download a converter app onto my computer so I could change them into a usable format. Grr. Just when I get used to dealing with the technology at hand, I have to learn something new. Why do tech companies do that?

This week's solar eclipse over Spain:

Juan Carlos Muño
Time-lapse pic by Juan Carlos Muñoz, astronomer, science communicator and media officer at ESO. Photographed from Peñafiel in the north of Spain. https://fosstodon.org/@astro_jcm@mastodon.online/117094881754294266

-Anne

Reading books that make me feel uncomfortable for all the right reasons

I've been grappling with the criticism in some circles that being "woke" is undesirable. Why would any educated person think it's a bad idea to be aware of what others go through on a daily basis? Why is it "woke" to read about what happened to others [POC, women, children, Indigenous people ... fill in the blank] in history books or for those history textbooks to correct misinformation as new information comes to light? I've come to a recent observation that the critique comes from people who don't want to put in the work to learn about unpleasant and uncomfortable truths. 

Don and I recently finished the Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book by Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, which examines the great migration out of southern states when six million Black Americans left their homes for locations in the North and West starting in 1915 and continuing until 1970. The book is organized around the lives of three of these migrants: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, who fled Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who had to leave Florida for Harlem in 1945 in fear for his life; and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of being able to use all of his medical skills in California. 

The book, published in 2010, clearly took Wilkerson years to compile. She conducted a series of extensive interviews with the three protagonists over many years so she was able to give readers a very complete profile of their lives before, during, and after they migrated. By focusing on three individual stories Wilkerson was able to show aspects of life in the South which led to the need/desire to move and the migration routes which generally followed train lines. After conducting over 1000 interviews and doing a deep dive into a broad swath of research on the migration, Wilkerson was able to dispel the many misconceptions that transplanted Blacks were more uncouth, ignorant, and impoverished than the Black people who were already in the northern cities. Extensive scholarship shows them to be more like immigrants from Europe, who arrived in the new land ready to work hard, improve their economic conditions, and ready to assimilate into their new land.

The Warmth of Other Suns wasn't an easy book to read, both Don and I agreed. The stories of terrible inequality and unfair treatment of Blacks, where ever they lived, was depressing and maddening. Typically we can listen to hours of audiobooks on long car trips without pausing. Not so with this book. The stories kept hitting us like gut punches and we would have to take breaks from listening as we digested the new information. Fortunately we were together so we could stop and talk to work through our feelings. It was hard work but we were learning and waking up. It took us over a month of listening, an hour here, an hour there for a total of 22+ hours. When we finished we both were very glad we read the book, but relieved we were done. I rated the book with 4 stars for the above reasons. Don rated the book with 4 stars for its content and 3 stars for entertainment value. Like I said, it was hard work reading this book and most people want to enjoy what they read. Isn't that fair?

A week after we finished The Warmth of Other Suns I found myself reading Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe, as part of the Goodreads Summer Challenge. It is set in the South Side of Chicago in the late 1990s during the process of dismantling the housing projects built to accommodate many of the migrant Blacks who made their way to the city in the 1930s and 40s. By the 90s people living in these projects found themselves crammed together in inhospitable conditions, beset by the crack-cocaine epidemic, and overrun by rival gangs. The story is told by a 12-year-old girl who loses all her friends, and nearly loses her brother, in this one fateful summer. It is a heartbreaking story, though the girl makes it out of the projects with help from a special teacher and her church. But like the previous book, I found reading Last Summer on State Street was hard work. It gave me an updated look at other effects of the Great Migration, too. 

I am never upset when I learn something new from a book, even if I find it difficult to read. My discomfort is, after all, helping me to become more "woke" and hopefully a better antiracist. My rating of this book was 4 stars.

Challenges: 20 books of Summer (#26 & #27); Big Book Summer (640 pages); Audiobooks with Don; and Goodreads Summer Challenge (11/11).

-Anne

Review: LAND (+Friday56 LinkUp)

Title: Land by Maggie O'Farrell

Book beginning/First Line Friday quote: 

His father was ever the man of a few words. Even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.

Friday56 quote: 

Tomás will not repent. He has nothing to repent for: he is as certain of this as he is of his own name, as he is of the orientation of magnetic north.

Summary:

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse of trees. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. (Publisher)

Review:

O'Farrell, author of Hamnet, opens her latest book with the above epigraph -- the definition of the Irish word "seanchaí". It seems to me that the author has assigned herself as the custodian of tradition and a reciter of ancient lore in her book Land. And it may explain the way that the story often uses fable-like elements even when the majority of it is very realistic. Though the story uses the omniscient 3rd person style, sometimes the point of view shifts from its human characters to dogs, the house, the land, even an unborn baby. The land looks back into prehistory and then later it zooms the story forward way past the lives of the characters in Tomás' family. these time shifts are a bit confusing.

The book begins with Liam, the oldest son in the family, looking back on the day when everything shifted for him and his family...the day his father stepped into a magical copse of trees and drank from a well he found there. This well seemed to have magical abilities and creatures one might expect to find in Celtic mythology. When Tomás, an Irishman, emerged from the forest he was a changed man, one determined to no longer work for the English by making their maps for them. But his mapmaking was how Tomás supported his family: Phina, the mother, Liam his son, daughters Enda and Rose, and an unborn son Eugene. Ultimately the episode in the copse also led Tomás to sell everything and move his family, against their wishes, out of Dublin to the lonely plot of land near the special, magical forest.

The scene from the Friday56 quote is during an attempted exorcism by a Catholic priest on Tomás. It is the first of a lifetime of disasters which befall the family, perhaps as a way to highlight Ireland's dismal history. Fortunately the book ends on a sweet, positive note, otherwise I'd say a lot of the story is very dark.

I thought the writing was beautiful and would often find myself swept up in the epic story. I also found it a tremendously hard book to read very fast. I just poked along for over a month making little progress even though I was listening to the audiobook. That is the second week in a row where I've confessed to my slow reading. Maybe it is me, not the books? My rating: 4 stars.

At 400 pages, this qualifies for Big Book Summer Challenge

__________________________________________________________

Sign up for The Friday56 on the Inlinkz below. 

RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your e-reader (If you want to improvise, go ahead!)

*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

*Post it to your blog and add your url to the Linky below. If you do not add the specific url for your post, we may miss it! 

*Visit other blogs and leave comments about their snippets. Expand the community. Please leave a comment for me, too!  

Also visit Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader and First Line Friday hosted by Reading is My Super Power to share the beginning quote from your book.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

.

-Anne

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” —Oscar Wilde

TTT: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday: 

Books I Was Reading On This Day, August 11th, Over the Last Ten Years 

This was fun. And I think looking at these ten+ books, you see what kind of reader I am -- an omnivore.

2026 currently listening to: Country People by Daniel Mason (Audio, contemporary, 19% complete)

2026 currently reading: Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe (Print, Contemporary, 81% complete)

2025: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Audio; Literary fiction)

2025: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (Print; Sci-Fi)

2024: Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn (Mystery, thriller)

2023: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (Contemporary when it was published in the 1980s)

2022: The Heart of American Poetry by Edward Hirsh (Print; Poetry analysis)

2022: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Audio; Historical fiction)

2021: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Sci-Fi)

2020: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Mystery / thriller)

2019: On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (YA Contemporary)

2018: Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen by Deborah Hopkinson (Children's Lit. / Biography, illustrated)

2017: The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems by Billy Collins (Poetry)

2016: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Classic)

Note, I selected two books for 2025 and 2022 because I finished them on approximately the same day, August 11th on their year.

-Anne

Classics Club Spin #45 is Coming

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin!.

What is the spin?

It’s easy.  Before next Sunday 16th August, 2026 create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain “to be read” on my Classics Club list.

This is my Spin List.

I will have to read one of these twenty books by the end of the spin period.

I'm hoping I get a book I already own: The Sun Also Rises or The Good Earth, so I don't have to buy another.

On Sunday 16th August CC hosts will post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by the 4th October, 2026.

The CC Club will check in on the 4th October to see who made it the whole way and finished their spin book! I hope I'm one of them.

My List 

(For three of the weeks of this time frame I will be on a trip, so I am limiting my choices to books I think I can finish before I leave or are small enough to carry along with me. That is why I have some duplicates.)

CC Spin # 45

1.      The Good Earth by Buck

2.      Scoop by Waugh

3.      Death Comes for the Archbishop by Cather

4.      To the Lighthouse by Woolfe

5.      The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov

6.      Heart of Darkness by Conrad

7.      The Importance of Being Ernest by Wilde

8.      Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

9.      Elmer Gantry by Sinclair

10. On the Road by Kerouac

11. Siddhartha by Hesse

12. The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway

13. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

14. The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway

15. The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov

16. The Good Earth by Buck

17. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Cather

18. Siddhartha by Hesse

19. The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway

20. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

-Anne

#6Degrees --Starting with LAND and ending on ...?

booksaremyfavouriteandbest

Six Degrees of Separation. Making the related jumps from book to book. Stay with me.

We begin with --

↓

Land by Maggie O'Farrell
A story about a family and particularly special plot of land on a peninsula in Ireland.

↓
First degree --

North Woods by Daniel Mason
One plot of land and everything that happened on that spot over the history of the country. A very clever way of thinking about the past.

↓
Second Degree --

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
This time the story is about a house and how it changed over the years with each of its new inhabitants.

↓
3rd Degree--

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Another story about a house and the siblings who grow up in it. It is also about inheritance and loss.

↓
4th Degree --

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
This might seem like a big leap but there are also two siblings in this story living alone in the big house with an uncle. What happened to rest of the family? Were they murdered? 

↓
5th degree--

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
A young governess comes to take of care two children, wards of an uncle. Either the house or the grounds are haunted. Are the ghosts up to no good?

↓
6th Degree --

The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde
A ghost tries to scare away the new inhabitants of Canterville Chase by resorting to all his haunting tricks. The family refuses to believe in him no matter what he does.

I had no idea where this chain would lead especially going from a lovely story about a particular piece of land in Ireland and ending up with a silly ghost who is a wash-out and can't even scare people anymore.

-Anne

Review: THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY (+Friday56 LinkUp)

I just finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. It took me two months to read and it felt like it, too. I just piddled along reading maybe ten pages a day, not feeling like I was making any progress, because I wasn't. I liked the story, in fact, I liked the story a lot. I just couldn't make myself read it. It was the oddest thing. When I discussed my problem with a nephew at a recent gathering he suggested I needed to set aside a block of time with the book so I could immerse myself in it. He also suggested trying the audiobook. I did and that did the trick. Within a few days of switching formats, I found myself completely captivated by the story. When I wasn't listening, I was wishing I was. Within a week I had finished the book -- no easy feat since the book is 670 pages long and over 26 hours of listening time. No wonder I felt like high-fiving myself when I completed it.

Oddly now that I am finished, I miss the book. Ever feel that way? It makes sense, though, for it was my constant companion for the better part of the summer. I just learned that the author, Kiran Desai, took 20 years to write the book. Gulp! In an interview with Alexandra Alter, Desai said she didn't realize how thoroughly the story would swallow her and she feared she would never finish the book. Now that it is done she feels lonely without it. "It was so much my entire world that life seems very thin on the other side of this book. I don’t quite know what to do with myself. It was my companion all these years,” she said. (NYT) I thought 2 months was a long time to be immersed in a story, just imagine living inside a story for 20 years!

The book starts in India with Sonia's grandparents and aunt, Mina Foi, discussing what the cook should make for the day's meals since the cook must go directly to the market. This begins not only to show the stark differences between Indian and American cultures but also a recurring theme of kebabs.

It was Mina's fifty-fifth birthday, the first day of December in the year 1996, and the mutton for the dinner kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen. 'Rice or Roti?' Ba [grandma] shouted. She was growing deaf, but she knew she must raise her voice over the morning traffic thundering past the front gate and the cawing of hundreds of crows -- their racket and the sun's struggle so closely linked, it was as if each morning the crows gave birth to the light. --Mina Foi, Ba, and Dadji, pg. 1

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny deals with, um, the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, two Indians living in the United States, feeling displaced and isolated from family and culture. Yet when they return to India, each doesn't feel quite at home there either. 

'I spend all my time trying to pretend I am not lonely! If you are lonely, you feel ashamed, and the only relief to your shame is being alone, which is what makes you lonely in the first place.' -Sonia, p. 49

One thing seemed certain: If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out. Yet despite this fact, they refused to remain apart. India invaded his life all the way from the other side of the world, and then life here became instantly artificial, a taunt. He became an impostor, a spy, a liar, and a ghost. -Sunny, p. 82                                       

The book begins with Sonia attending college in Vermont with dreams of becoming an author. Sunny is living in Brooklyn after graduating college and working for the AP as a copy editor in the New York office, with dreams of becoming a journalist. As their loneliness and sense of isolation deepens both try to find ways to cope. Sonia by starting a relationship with a mentally ill artist who is very controlling and demeaning. Sunny by disappearing as a whole person.

There was so much life in this country that Sunny needn’t bother to create one. His life could be simply looking upon life. -Sunny

As both Sunny and Sonia pursue their writing careers separately, their lives seem to be on a collision course. First Sonia's family proposes an arranged marriage with Sunny, which he dismisses out of hand. Later in a pivotal moment in the story back in India, they are on the same train heading to Allahabad, where their families have a connection. This brief encounter sets up future interactions. Still later they meet up on in Goa (Southwest India on the coast) where they get to know each other better and love blossoms. It would seem that a full throttled romance was on its way but what happens is much more tangled and twisted.

So what is the story about? It is about culture and displacement. It is about family and traditions. It is also about post-colonialism, superstition, and magic. And ultimately it is about finding self awareness and acceptance. Maureen Corrigan, reviewing the book for NPR described The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny as a book of ideas. Nalini Iver, writing for the International Examiner, says "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a deeply satisfying, profoundly moving, witty, and occasionally heart-rending novel that explores immigration, alienation, the relationship between art, the artist, and artistic subject. It also probes the changing role of women in contemporary society." Nobody can quite put their finger on all the themes covered in this book. Just suffice it to say there are a lot!

My favorite parts of the book shined a light on differences in cultures and the ways that people within those cultures view property, nature, parenthood, etc. and how the characters viewed themselves in those other cultures. For example, here Sonia is talking to Babita, Sunny's mother, try to explain what it is like in America:

'It was all the things I’d have to do alone.' 'Why would you have to do anything alone?' asked Babita. 'It’s the premise of being American: You are an individual, therefore you are alone. Therefore you must be able to do everything by yourself. Rent a car at an airport, drive yourself cross-country to a job in a place you’ve never heard of, defeat your enemies, trap a rat, make money to pay bills to look after yourself even when you are dying—' -Sonia to Babita

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was a 2025 Booker Prize finalist, therefore I thought that would be a great place to start as I looked around for book club discussion questions. I will be leading the discussion on the book the end of this month. Here are two resources I thought would be helpful:

• Booker Prize Readers' Guide: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
• LS&S: Sweet Shoppe Sugar Babe

My rating  for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is on a sliding scale. I give the book a 5-star rating for the writing, the complexity, and the epic nature of the story. But I give the book a 4-star rating rating based on my reading experience with it. I just had such a hard time actually reading it. Suffice it to say, it is a beautiful, rewarding, yet hard book to read.

At 670 pages, this qualifies for Big Book Summer Challenge

__________________________________________________________

Sign up for The Friday56 on the Inlinkz below. 

RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your e-reader (If you want to improvise, go ahead!)

*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

*Post it to your blog and add your url to the Linky below. If you do not add the specific url for your post, we may miss it! 

*Visit other blogs and leave comments about their snippets. Expand the community. Please leave a comment for me, too!  

Also visit Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader and First Line Friday hosted by Reading is My Super Power to share the beginning quote from your book.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

-Anne