News, TBR, WIP

It's been another busy month. 

I have read 27 books so far in 2020. I finished a wall hanging this month and my yellow roses sampler quilt top is ready to be sent to the machine quilter. I finally started on an Emily Dickinson quilt.

The Wednesday Afternoon Book Club at our local library read The Marsh King's Daughter, a psychological suspense story set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Author Karen Dionne lives in Metro Detroit and we were thrilled to have her at our meeting to tell us about the book and her writing.

Before book club, my husband and I took Karen to Frittata, Clawson's wonderful breakfast and brunch restaurant.

We had a great turn out. Karen was an engaging speaker. Our meeting lasted twice as long as usual with a question and answer time and book signing after Karen's talk.

The Marsh King's Daughter has been translated into many languages; some of the foreign editions are shown below.

The next book club pick is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I haven't read it since I was a teenager. 

I was thrilled to get a different kind of 'book mail' when Lenore Riegel, author Jerome Charyn's partner, sent me the DVD My Letter to the World about Emily Dickinson. Charyn is interviewed in the film. More about it later.

Lenore also sent me Charyn's novel Johnny One-Eye set during the American Revolution!

I used a Christmas gift card to purchase the newest book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. I read the introduction to Tightrope at the library and was hooked. The story of Kristof's hometown peers whose lives ended in poverty and tragedy is moving and offers deep insight into the conditions that have created today's political landscape.

A LibraryThing giveaway arrived, Simon The Fiddler by Paulette Jiles. I read her Stormy Weather some years ago and have News of the World on my Kindle TBR pile.

Currently Reading:

• Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry by Mary Ann Hoberman and Carolyn Hopley; the poems are hitting me in a personal way
• A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories by Daniel Mason whose novel The Winter Soldier I enjoyed
• Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade about the London square once home to poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf 
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
• The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn

Books on my review shelf include:

• Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles
• Country by Michael Hughes
• The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
• Night. Sleep. Death. by Joyce Carol Oates
• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue whose debut novel Behold the Dreamers I read
• The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts
• Bronte's Mistress by Finola Austin about Branwell Bronte
• American Follies by Norman Lock from his American Novel series which I have enjoyed (The Wreckage of Eden, The Feast Day of the Cannibals, A Boy in His Winter)

I made this wall hanging from Gingiber's Thicket prints for my son.

My husband celebrated his 70th birthday in February. His older brother gifted him a Charlie Harper signed print. It's been traveling through the family as another brother first owned it!

And just for fun, here is my intrepid brother with a new friend.

Shades of Karen Dionne's upcoming psychological suspense novel, The Wicked Sister! Bears are an important theme in the novel.