Book lovers ~ celebrate

Oh, my!  I almost missed it.  August 9th is National Book Lovers Day.  I hope you spent some time reading today.  I did.

Leave a comment naming one of your favorite books, or one you recently read and enjoyed, or one that surprised you.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

It's Sunday, so let's color "Sunday" and brighten our world.  Well, let's color Seurat's painting, I mean.  It's called "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte."  Make a copy of this coloring page, color it, and send it to me, if you're willing.  I'll assemble them all on a bulletin board and share a photo of our bright splash of color here on Bonnie's Books.  Are you in?

"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (longer title) was painted from 1884 to 1886, and is Georges Seurat's most famous work.  It's an example of pointillist technique, and it's on a large canvas.  You can see he includes a lot of Parisians at a park on the banks of the River Seine.  So once again, are you in?  Will you share?  It would be fun to see lots of variations on the colors we would choose.

Here's the bulletin board, after I put up ten copies to be colored.  If you live at the Crown Center, come get one.  I can add more, as needed.

Journaling ~ what exactly is a local household?

Life's Compline: A Journey Just Begun, a 2020 book by Betty Creamer, has questions for journaling.  This morning, I came across an interesting prompt (p. 68) that I spent time considering.

"What different local household settings have you experienced in your life?"

She put quotation marks around "local household."  I'd never thought of my life in this way.  That chapter gave us facts like:

• Over the course of their lives, people experience a series of very different living situations.
• Many people establish one or more different families.
• People often live alone for phases of their lives, especially in old age.
• Many elders have experienced changes in living situations.

So how do I enumerate "living situations"?  I tried to sort it out.  The author says it starts with "the biological family of origin."

1. Being the oldest child, I once had two parents all to myself.
2. Then we were four, with a baby brother getting way too much attention.
3. Then a baby sister came along, the sister who stole my playmate's attention.  (Do I detect a pattern here?)
4. When I was almost nine, I got another baby brother, but I was a big girl in third grade by then.
5. I married, so there were only the two of us.
6. When our twin daughters arrived, my family added up to four again.
7. The girls' baby brother made us a family of five.
8. My in-laws moved in with us when we built a bigger family house, making us a family of seven.
9. My father-in-law died, so we were down to six.
10. I divorced my husband, and his mother moved out, too.  My family was down to me and three kids.
11. I invited my mother and my Aunt Bonnie to live with us, making us a family of six.
12. (Several other changes occurred as my daughters grew up, moved out, married.)
13. My son and I moved to Knoxville when I changed jobs, leaving my mother to take care of my house in Chattanooga alone, with my help on weekends with things like mowing the grass.
14. My son chose to move back to Chattanooga and live with his dad so he could go to high school with his friends, and I was suddenly an empty-nester, alone.
15. Mother and I lived together, when I gave up that job and moved home.
16. I sold the house, Mom moved into an apartment in Chattanooga, and I lived alone in an apartment in Atlanta (and a couple of times over the three years with other students as roommates), while pursuing a graduate degree at Emory University.
17. When I graduated, Mother and I once again lived together in Chattanooga and for a year in Knoxville.
18. When Mom's Alzheimer's got to be more than I could deal with while working, she went to a nursing home and I lived alone.
19. After that, my friend Donna and I lived in the same house or apartment twice, alternating with living alone in different apartments.
20. I moved to St. Louis and now live alone in a retirement center.

Friends around "my" table at the Crown Center in 2018

Or do I?  Although I live alone in my apartment, I could say I have a HUGE family now, counting many of my neighbors in this building as my current family.  We talk nearly every day, do things together, rely on each other for help.  But would you call us "family"?  Maybe.  But either way, it definitely fits under the author's "changes in living situations."

But now I wonder ... do pets "count" as family?  I'd have to figure in a bunch of them, ending with Clawdia right now.  I'm not sure, though, whether she's "family" or if I'm working for her for free.  This morning, hours before I should have awakened, I heard a mighty tussle going on in my kitchen.  Loud enough to wake me from a sound sleep.  I jumped up, ran to the kitchen, and found that Clawdia had tackled the heavy, double layered bag of dry cat food that I'd left on the floor and had not yet put away in a cabinet.  Notice the hole in it.  How the heck did she do that?  She was declawed before I got her, and she's had mouth surgery and now has no "fangs" at all.  Her only claws are on her back paws.  But she had apparently decided that, if I wouldn't get up and feed her, she'd just do it herself, dad gum it!

Word of the Day

tus·sle / ˈtəsəl / noun = a vigorous struggle or scuffle, typically in order to obtain or achieve something.  Example:  "I found Clawdia in a tussle with this bag of Meow Mix."

Luckily, I still had the previous bag, so I was able to dump the food from this torn bag into one I could close.

Reverse Readathon

What is it?

It's a challenge to read during these 24 hours and post about it on my blog.  Mini-challenges are offered throughout the day.  The 24-hour readathon happens twice a year, in April and in October.  The first readathon, hosted by Dewey, was held in October 2007 (I was there).  Dewey died in late 2008, and though we’re still saddened by her absence (I still have links on the right sidebar, down near the bottom), the show must go on.  The read-a-thon was renamed to honor Dewey in 2009.  Now it's a Reverse Readathon, hosted by Kate of Kate’s Book Nook and Gabby of Gabs About Books.

When is it?

The Reverse Readathon began at 7:00 pm on August 7, 2020 in the Central time zone, where I am.  Yikes, I'm late discovering it.  I can't find the sign-up page, but I could see 519 were already on the list of readers.  So I'll just do my own thing, here on my blog, and start reading.

Books I may read

1. Redhead by the Side of the Road ~ by Anne Tyler, 2020, fiction (Maryland)
2. Life's Compline: A Journey Just Begun ~ by Betty Creamer, 2020, theology
3. Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor ~ by Layla F. Saad, 2020, race relations

Bingo card

An explanation of how to play this Bingo card is on this Readathon page, but here's the simple version:

1. For a book to count for a square, you must have read a minimum of 50 pages.
2. You are NOT required to finish a book before marking a bingo square complete.
3. You may fit your book into as many squares as you can.

Beginning ~ with his run at 7:15 a.m.

You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer.  He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.  At seven fifteen every morning you see him set out on his run.  Along about ten or ten thirty he slaps the magnetic TECH HERMIT sign onto the roof of his Kia.

Redhead by the Side of the Road ~ by Anne Tyler, 2020, fiction (Maryland)

Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit.  A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.  But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son.  These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.  This is an intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes.

This novel is part of the library loot I got yesterday.  I've been reading more nonfiction than fiction lately, so I am really ready for a story by Anne Tyler.  I can get lost in her books, totally absorbed in the lives of her characters.  What I've read so far at the beginning of this book seems like it will take my mind off the pandemic as I follow Micah Mortimer as he runs through the streets of Baltimore.  I'm ready.

============================
Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts
Book Beginnings on Fridays.
Click this link for book beginnings
shared by other readers.
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Thursday travels via WindowSwap

Amsterdam

Tram in Amsterdam, found when I tried to find photos of trolleys there.

This is my favorite window view, so far, using WindowSwap.  I got to do a lot of people watching out this window.  There was a canal outside a window in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and people were biking across a little bridge along with cars, vans, mopeds, vehicles, pedestrians, and long, multisectional trolley cars going across the bridge.  Each of the trolleys had different window configurations.

Oooh, the bridge was raised as I watched, so that a long, empty barge could pass through.  It was almost as wide as the opening spanned by the bridge.  It moved through quickly, and the bridge came back down.  Fascinating to watch!  On the other side of the canal, pedestrians traversed a curved flight of stairs.  A dog on its own trotted across the bridge.

Word of the Day

tram / British = a trolley car.  Under other words for tram, I found trolley (which I used above) and streetcar (which is what Mother called the ones we rode in Chattanooga when I was a small child).  In another place, I found this definition:  "A tram is a rail vehicle that runs on tramway tracks along public urban streets."

Kigali

Sheila's window looks across a concrete courtyard at street level in Kigali, Rwanda.  In 2006, I read A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000) by Gil Courtemanche, about the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda that were associated with the country’s civil war.  That was before I started blogging, but I did write about the book in 2014, twenty years after the killing began.  (Click the title to read my blog post.)

The book was very memorable, and I actually met one of the men who fled Rwanda and was living in Chattanooga in the early 2000s.  The massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus lasted for three months, and 800,000 people were killed.  From Sheila's window, however, I can't see much beyond the gated courtyard.

Luxembourg City

I see a residential area outside Igor's window in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.  The street is narrow with parked cars narrowing it even more, so vehicles slow down when they approach each other.

Giza near Cairo

Oh, surprise, surprise!  I can see two pyramids — no, a little bit of the third one — as I stare out of Abdulrahman's window in Giza, Egypt.  I'm pretty sure it's the tops of these three I can see.  There are city buildings between the window and the pyramids, but I can't see any of the streets or traffic or people.  I've never seen a picture of these famous pyramids from a window with the shutters open.  Just the touristy sort, like this one I found online.

Reading's different on a Kindle

Life's Compline: A Journey Just Begun ~ by Betty Creamer, 2020, 

This book uses the term "Compline Years" because the order of Compline in the Daily Office (Episcopal Book of Common Prayer) provides prayers at the end of the day, and the Compline years provide seniors with time for prayerful reflection in the latter days of life.  While the Compline prayers embrace the hope and faith that the faithful sleep and then awaken to a new day, the Compline of life embodies and animates the hope and faith of the deep sleep of death as part of the journey just begun in the light and love of God in eternity.

I started reading this book today, on August 5th, even though I bought it for my Kindle on August 1st, one day after the first edition (the Kindle edition) was published on July 31st.  I wanted to finish another book I was reading before jumping into this one.

In a note immediately following the front mater, the author has added "A Word in Time of Pandemic," saying, "I conpleted the body of this book in February, 2020 with a vision ... Enter COVID-19."  It was the first time I've seen "COVID-19" in a published book, so I tapped to highlighted it so I could see what Wikipedia had to say about it.  After three sentences about the origin of this virus, I read this:

"As of 5 August 2020, more than 18.5 million cases have been reported across 188 countries and territories, resulting in more than 701,000 deaths.  More than 11.1 million people have recovered."

Wow!  Published books in our time are amazing!  The facts keep getting updated.  I was shocked to see reference to TODAY in a book I bought four days ago.  I used to say I prefer holding a "real" book in my hands, rather than an electronic one.  But this sort of thing is changing my mind.  I like being able to look things up without doing anything more than tapping the screen.  I like highlighting quotes and typing notes into the book exactly where I'm reading.

Word of the Day

com·pline / ˈkämplin / noun = a service of evening prayers forming part of the Divine Office of the Western Christian Church, that is traditionally said or chanted before retiring for the night.

Example:  The author says, "I use the term 'Compline Years' because the order of Compline in the Daily Office provides prayers at the end of the day, and the Compline years provide seniors with time for prayerful reflection in the latter days of life" (p. 16).

She was specific on page 12:  "the Compline Years (ages 65 and older)."  So what I've learned today is that, even in my "Compline Years," I can keep learning and being excited about new things.  Now I'm off to bed where I'll read more of this book before I sleep.