Sunday Salon: Gettysburg, Currently Reading
I didn’t write a Sunday Salon post last week because we were in Gettysburg visiting our College Boy. Overall, it was a good trip. We spent Saturday at the Gettysburg Museum and Visitors Center, at which the photo above was taken by yours truly. I highly recommend going there if you’re ever in the area. It’s well done, highly informative, and relatively inexpensive at $9 per person. I learned a lot more about the Civil War and Gettysburg than I knew before. Very worthwhile. Our intention was to do the Museum followed by a self-guided car tour of the battlefield but we didn’t have enough time. Hopefully we’ll get to that during another visit. We also ate at what has become our favorite pizza place in the area (Deliso’s, because of their delicious GF pizza), the Lincoln Diner, and a restaurant called Mela Kitchen at Jack’s Cider House where we had more GF pizza.
(If you’re gluten free and vegetarian, as we are, Gettysburg can be a tough place for dining out, so GF pizza is generally our go-to.)
Anyway, the rest of the week after the trip was fairly uneventful. The weather’s been lovely — great fall temperatures. Love this time of year, even if it does mean that winter is right around the corner.
Reading
I was so excited when my library hold for Lauren Groff’s new novel Matrix (Riverhead, 2021) came in on Friday afternoon. What better way to usher in a weekend when you have nothing else planned! After doing the absolute bare minimum of necessary housecleaning yesterday (dusting, vacuuming, cleaning toilets), I rewarded myself by spending some time on the deck with this.
Here’s the premise of Matrix, according to Goodreads: Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
I’m only on page 48 and so far…it’s okay. Groff’s doing something unconventional with her comma placement on occasion, which is making me irksome. For now, I’m trying to ignore this. Fates and Furies was a DNF for me, much to my great sadness, because I love all of Groff’s previous books, so I’m really hoping I like this.
In my last Salon post (see above), I told you a bit about The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) and The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer (FSG Originals, 2020). I finished both of them, solid 4 star reads each, and they will likely be among my favorites this year. They’re also good choices for R.I.P., for those of you participating. (Hell, the cover of The Seventh Mansion makes it a R.I.P. read, in my opinion.)
This week I also finished a short story collection and two poetry collections. How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit, 2018) was my choice for POPSUGAR’s “read an Afrofuturist book” reading challenge prompt. I’m not much of a science fiction or fantasy reader but I appreciated Jemisin’s inventiveness with these stories. Goldenrod (Atria/One Signal, 2021) is a strong poetry collection from Maggie Smith, with themes of motherhood and current events. An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo (W.W. Norton, 2019), the current Poet Laureate of the United States, takes its inspiration from her Native American heritage and the forced removal of her ancestors from their land.
Some reading challenge news, for those of you who are into (and appreciate) this kind of thing:
This week I reached my Goodreads goal of reading 52 books in 2021. I always set my goal at 52 because, for me, an average of one book per week should be more than attainable. I thought about revising my goal upwards but decided against it.
And the other week I discovered that I’m this close to completing the POPSUGAR reading challenge! As of this writing, I have 7 more prompts. Absolutely doable. This has never happened before with me and POPSUGAR. I know some of you readers will understand what a big deal this is, am I right? The remaining prompts fit nicely with R.I.P. and Victober. (Victorian October — aka Victober — is an event that highlights reading literature published by a British or Irish writer during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) and is hosted by a trio of Booktubers, Katie at Books and Things, Kate Howe and Lucy the Reader.)
You can’t tell it from this post, but my reading life has been beset by DNFs lately — three of them in September alone, for a total of 17 so far this year. That may be an all-time high for me. I’ve always been a proponent of DNFing books because life is too damn short, but I’m getting increasingly selective and picky in my old age, it seems. I have no tolerance for books that I’m not enjoying.
Here are a few more photos from the Gettysburg Museum.