Some Ramblings about Reading

It's been an extremely busy few weeks with not much book blogging and not even much reading. But I do have several books on my mind!

First of all, I promised to give away my copy of An Absolute Gentleman! I had my daughter randomly choose a number from those who commented on my review by February 29, and the winner is (drumroll, please) Naida! (If you'll email me your snail mail address, Naida, I'll send the book to you as soon as I can.)

I've also got to mail two books that have been requested of me via BookMooch and PaperBackSwap - Barbara Vine's Gallowglass and Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation, respectively. Getting to the post office is a challenge for me at times, but it'll happen soon!

In addition to needing to send books out, I've received a few books lately!

The Book Buddies pick for March is People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. I've only been reading the group pick about every other month and really hoped to participate in March, but since the book is a new release, there are a lot of holds on it at the library. Realizing that I probably wouldn't be able to get it from the library until the end of the month, I decided to order it from amazon.com. They had it at a decent price, and thanks to Christine, I had a $10 gift card I could apply to the order. The book was delivered early this week, and that is what I've been reading a few pages from this week. I made some progress on the book this morning and have just finished posting a few of my thoughts over at the Book Buddies blog.

I also recently received in the mail a package from Florinda. She'd read Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah and generously offered to pass her copy along to me. It'll probably be a few months until I get to it, but once I read it, I'd love to pass it along to someone else.

Thursday one more book package arrived. This one was from Susan, who had held a drawing for a copy of The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. My friend Cynthia had previously recommended the book to me - and I included it on my "What's in a Name?" challenge list - so when I saw that Susan was going to give her copy away, I hoped that I would get it. And I did!

One last book note for today! We visited the PTA book fair after the kids' parent-teacher conferences Thursday night. Sugar Bear got some Avatar: The Last Airbender books, Sugar Plum got Becoming Naomi León, and I got Poor Pluto!, a book written and illustrated by third-grade students of Tokay Colony Elementary School in Lodi, California.