Some weekends, most in fact, I love getting out-shopping, hanging out with friends, just a brisk walk.  But this weekend, I just needed some down time, so I’ve been very, very sedentary…and since I lost the short story collection I was planning on discussing today (I’m sure it’ll turn up soon), so here’s what I did this weekend (book-wise):

• went to the library (there’s supposed to be a pic of the loot, but my camera decided not to cooperate) and got: two YA books (The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt and Song of the Sparrowby Lisa Ann Sandell), two books on CD (Peony in Love by Lisa See and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck) and five non-fiction (Memo to the President Elect by Madeleine Albright, Annals of the Former World by John McPhee, Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker, A Billion Bootstraps by Phil Smith and Eric Thurman, Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and The Supreme Court by Jeffrey Rosen)
• went B&N (where I didn’t buy any books! yay!)
• read two library books: The Wednesday Wars (awesome!) and Memo to the President Elect (awful)
• got two bookmooches in the mail: The Watermelon King by Daniel Wallace and Scotland: an Intimate Portrait by Geddes MacGregor
• finished up The Economist, which didn’t arrive until Friday, so it was a marathon to get it read by today
• realised that my international reading this year has been less than impressive; thus, read Khufu’s Wisdom, the first in Naguib Mahfouz’s Ancient Cairo trilogy (awesome!) and began If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (see the bottom of this post for more on that)
• got mad at bloglines for not working, so switched to Google Reader (in the process, suddenly realised I could subscribe to newspapers)
• started John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World (for the planet earth challenge) and realised I might be in over my head
• went and read another YA book, called The Other Book by Philip Womack in order to comfort myself (it was ok)
• found out that my review of The Looming Tower is up at CurledUp.com; you should go read it, since I love the book (it’s non-fiction and focuses on the rise of Al-Qaeda; and for all you prize junkies, it won the Pulitzer)

And that’s about been my weekend-I also played with/distracted my niece (she’s been sick, so very clingy and needy) and made a really good pot of vegetarian chili (I’ve been tinkering with recipes lately, since I’m very particular about my chili).  I’m also trying to figure out how I’m going to fit in reviews for all the books I’ve read by Friday; most of the ones I haven’t talked about on the blog are review copies for other websites, but that leaves six, even if I don’t read any more books this week.  Looks like I’ll have to find some ‘themes’ so I can do multi-book reviews.   I hope everyone else has had a great weekend, whether it’s been a bookish one or not!  And I’ll leave you on a happy note with this awesome description of a visit to a bookstore from the first chapter of the Calvino (it’s long, but worth it):

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Ever Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Number. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiousity, Not Easily Justified.
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Authors Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you see in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.
You case another bewildered look at the books around you (or rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.