It’s a gorgeous, sunny Sunday afternoon, the last weekend of August and the last weekend of my summer vacation. It’s always a bit melancholy, a sadness at seeing the end of the summer days and a longing for “just one more week”. And yet there’s also the excitement of starting a new school year, a new beginning and a chance to do more and plan new activities to engage students. *sigh* This time of year is so hard… but I’m certainly not complaining.
I felt that I should write a short post, as it’s such a significant time of year, but I have no books to tell you about, as I’ve been reading Silver Birch nominee contenders most of the month and of course I can’t tell you about them. We had a meeting last week, though, to finalize our list of nominees, and I’m very pleased with the results, which, of course, I can’t tell you about either! You’ll just have to wait until the big announcement in October!
In lieu of a proper post, I thought I could tell you about what I’ve been doing these past couple of weeks. I’ve been reading Ruth Ozeki’s novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, for my next book club meeting. Last September my group read Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and they loved it, so I thought that scheduling this one would provide some sort of “book symmetry” - this is the first time I’ve ever scheduled books by the same author for the same month two years in a row. This year’s book, however, is not nearly as engaging as last year’s book, in my opinion. I’m finding it to be too long, and while there are nuggets of greatness, they are buried under too much “rubble” or extra stuff that is interesting but unnecessary. Still, I haven’t quite finished yet, so it may prove to be worth the reading effort. More about this book after our meeting.
I also stumbled upon a fabulous t-shirt in a used book store in Orangeville featuring the original cover of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve never seen t-shirts before, but I’ve seen other book-related merchandise by the Out of Print company, and I’m always so tempted to buy funky book-related socks, tote bags or other miscellaneous novelty items. Well, I couldn’t pass up the Atwood shirt, as it is probably my favourite book of all time, tied with The Winter of Our Discontent, of course.
And while in Owen Sound last week, I picked up a few books from the Owen Sound Public Library mini book sale, The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson and The Nanny by Gilly Macmillan. I’ve enjoyed books by all three of these authors in the past, and look forward to reading these new-to-me books, hopefully sometime soon.
That’s all for today. Enjoy the last week of August and I promise to get back into my regular-ish weekly posting routine next weekend.
Bye for now…Julie
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