Blogger app

I just downloaded the Blogger app to my iTouch. For free!! Free is awesome!

Now I have to try it out to see if it is worth it. Lol.

I could see where this could be very handy for quick posts when I am away from my computer.

Please bear with me while I play with it.

What app do you have that you love?

Road trip to select books

Today was the day that my book group took our trip to Barnes and Noble to select our books for the upcoming year. The nearest B&N is an hour away so this is a big deal and we have not traveled to do this for a couple of years. It was great to do it again and the day ended up to be a beautiful day for a road trip. After our book selection process, we went out for dinner in the big city before heading home. Let me tell you, this is my idea of a fabulous time!

OMG, let me tell you - it was so awesome seeing all the books that I have been seeing in the blogging world, right there in person! All those beautiful covers! And I could pick them up, hold them and flip through the pages. I was in Heaven! 

So, my book group has a fun way of selecting our books for the upcoming year. In September, we select all of the books for the next year. Every member bring 2 book suggestions to the group. We give our pitch for the books (read the synopsis, personal recommendations, etc.) and then we have a vote to see which one of them the group wants to read. It is always amazing to see the variety of books that we select. We then assign months to the books and usually the person that suggests the book hosts the group that month. It always seems to work out and we always have a great pile of books to read. I can't wait to dive into them! 

If you belong to a book group, how do you and your members select the books that you read? 
It would be interesting to hear about your method. 
I hope it is as fun as ours!

WWW Wednesdays September 14

WWW Wednesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading

To play along, just answer the following three questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

 

• I am currently reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert for my book group and Here, Hope, Home by Kaira Rouda, just for fun. 

 

Eat, Pray, Love is not as bad as I thought it would be. Is that terrible to say?

 

And I just realized that both books that I am currently reading have 3 words in their titles, separated by commas. Weird, huh?

• I recently finished reading --- well nothing new since last week --- I just keep plugging away at the 2 books above.

 

I am really enjoying Here, Hope Home but I have to get Eat, Pray, Love read for our book discussion.

• Next I am definitely going to treat myself and finally read What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. It sounds like a great book and it's been on my list for a while.

Happy reading everyone! 

 

So many books .... so little time!

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. 

In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times).~~synopsis from Goodreads

Ok, I went into this book sure that I would not like it. It was a selection for my book group, definitely NOT selected by me. The cover really put me off, I had NO idea who David Sedaris was, AND it was a book of essays. What? We aren't supposed to read ESSAYS in our book group! How can we talk about a bunch of different stories?

I started plowing through the book. Okay, so this guy is a little funny, I'll give you that. So I kept reading - I always try to finish the books we select. Somehow I happened to find a video on YouTube of Sedaris reading the very essay I had just read. OMG, hearing him read his own work was hilarious. I guess I just wasn't reading them 'right'.

After that I was able to really get into the book and thoroughly enjoyed it! I was able to hear his 'voice'. And we had so much to talk (and laugh) about when we discussed the book. It helped that we had plenty of good food and good wine too. 

As an aside, my book group went out to dinner to discuss Sedaris' book. Well, a local gentleman who has his own vineyard (and who happens to be loaded, money-wise) came into the restaurant while we were enjoying our drinks, before ordering dinner and discussing the book. He started talking with us, maybe a little flirting was going on, and he ended up buying each of us a glass of his very own wine. What a nice guy!!  So you can imagine how hilarious we thought Sedaris' book was after 2 drinks. Most of us are light-weights when it comes to alcohol anyway. We had a great time laughing about with the book.

Author's website

September 11