The Sunday Salon

We're celebrating The Husband's birthday this weekend, albeit in a very non-exciting way.  Among other things, yesterday (his actual birthday) he did several loads of laundry (as he does every weekend) and helped me clean out our closet.  The result is quite a number of suits, dress pants and shirts that will be donated to Goodwill tomorrow, along with two trash bags of Betty and Boo's outgrown clothes and some of my suits that don't fit me anymore.  Hopefully someone will be able to get good use out of these.

We did celebrate with one of The Husband's favorite dinners (baked ziti) and chocolate cake for dessert.  Can't go wrong with that!

Birthdays are always good for bringing out the nostalgia, and if you're a child of the '80s (as The Husband and I are), you will probably enjoy Rob Sheffield's Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut. I finished this one earlier this week, and for the most part, really enjoyed it.  Rob Sheffield definitely knows his '80s music (and music in general, as he is a columnist for Rolling Stone) and is incredibly talented and funny. 

I will say that the only part of the book that took me aback was Sheffield's treatment of Paul McCartney.  Now, I'm a Paul fan (very much so), but even if I wasn't, Sheffield's skewering of Paul was a little over the top and a bit disproportionate to some of the other musicians criticized in the book. I'll have more to say on this (and the parts I loved in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran) in my review. 

Thanks to a bit more local travel than usual, I spent a little more time in the car this week.  As a result, I was able to start and finish the audiobook of I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson. As audiobooks go, this one is relatively short at 6 hours, but I found the story to be rambling and disjointed.  Truthfully, it was almost a DNF for me.  Even though I felt a little sympathy for Arvid, the main character(we can all relate to experiencing regret and wishing back time gone by), I didn't much like Arvid and I kind of wanted him out of my car sooner rather than later.


Finally, my current book is a short story collection that is due back to the library on Tuesday without any more renewals left. (I found this, which was published in 2006, while browsing the shelves.) I'm really enjoying Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott, an author I haven't read before.  The first three stories ("Heaven and Hell," "Stumble," and "Worry") are all well-written and superbly crafted, and I'm looking forward to the other seven stories in this collection.

As much as I would like to spend this rainy Sunday curled up on the sofa and doing exactly that, there is more decluttering and packing on the agenda today.  This moving nonsense really has a way of cutting into one's reading and blogging time. 

How is your Sunday going?


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