Sunday Salon: the Rushed Post

I’ve read as many books this past week as I did during the entire month of November, which amuses me tremendously! So with eight books to talk about, and this post already quite belated, what’s a girl to do?

Fortunately, five of the books were Agatha Christie’s. I’ve mentioned before that Christie is a comfort author for me, so since I was bed-ridden most of the week, I managed to devour a short story collection (The Witness for the Prosecution), a Miss Marple (The Moving Finger), and three Poirots (Sad Cypress, The Patriotic Murders, and Taken at the Flood). The short story collection was abysmal; except for the title story, I wasn’t too impressed. Fortunately, the Miss Marple was spectacular (she’s my favourite of Christie’s sleuths, but I’ve read almost all of the books at this point, which is sad) and the Poirots were good as well (Taken at the Flood was my favourite).

That leaves me with the nonfiction! First, I did read a self-help book, which isn’t something I’ve done before. But I’m going through a tiny quarterlife crisis right now (I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about it when I’m done with the semester), so I picked up 20 Something, 20 Everything to try to help make sense of it all. And I think it did a pretty good job of letting me know I’m not alone, which is nice. The exercises seem a bit silly, but I’m new to the genre. Still, glad I bought it!

Then there’s Booknotes: Stories From American History, which I’ve been rading for ages now, a little bit at a time, to study for the foreign service exam. It’s a collection of interviews from the CSPAN program Booknotes with various historians that present vignettes of American history. Each ‘essay’ (they’re in essay-format but from interviews) is around 3-5 pages, and I liked the randomness of it. That being said, since there were so many contributors, it was a bit uneven, and sometimes I think the editing could have been better to make the spoken word flow better on the page.

Finally, there’s The Art of the Personal Letter by Margaret Shephard, which I snagged from the library’s new books section, because I’ve decided to write a letter a week to my grandparents next year. It was interesting, but the only practical knowledge I gained was about pen and paper types…the actual advice on how to write various forms of letters was too obvious and general for me. That being said, it was a cotton candy kind of nonfiction read, and I don’t consider it a waste of time.

Whew-now I have to get back to studying. But first, a few words about the World Citizenship Challenge…
I’m so glad that there’s an interest in doing it! I plan to have it run all of next year, but to have ‘mini-challenges’ that will be for a shorter time period. There will definitely be lists of recommended books coming as soon as this pesky thing called school is over. ;) And you don’t have to pick all of your books now by any means: a pool is just fine, or just picking which categories you want to read in.

And finally, all of the Dewey memorial posts around the blogosphere have been incredibly beautiful and touching. I’m working on my own, but I’m the type of person who deals with bad things by denying them, so in my head I’ve convinced myself she’s not actually gone at all. Because otherwise there’s no way I could be blithely blogging right now. Just wanted to put that out there.