Sunday Salon - March 11

I'm always torn when daylight savings time starts - I hate losing that hour of sleep the first night and I hate waking up again when it's still dark. But, dang, I'm really looking forward to those long evenings.

Yesterday really announced itself as spring here - highs in the upper 70's, mild breezes, sunshine. It was time to put away the snowman collection and start the spring cleaning. That always means that I'm pulling up rugs, tucking away blankets, and generally trying to make our spaces more airy. That always means I'm going to be rearranging the things on the bookshelves on either side of our fireplace. Remarkably, every time I do that, I'm surprised to find, amongst our collection of old books, some of the classics that I'd like to read some day.

It was a great coincidence that I happened to turn up some of these classics yesterday because only Friday I'd begun contemplating signing up for The Classics Club (hosted by Jillian of A Room Of One's Own). It's a big commitment (at least 50 books) but you get to set up your own time frame for completing the challenge (up to 5 years). Amongst your choices you can include short stories, novellas and children's books so that does make reaching that number much easier. I started poking around my house the other night and realized that I can reach that number without buying one book because we have so many classics I'd love to reread.

I also quietly snuck in the Willa Cather Novel Reading Challenge. I'm doing this one at the "un-challenge" level, which means that I can choose to read as many or as few of Cather's books with the group as I want. I'm planning on reading a couple of them, My Antonia and A Lost Lady. I so enjoyed O, Pioneers! last fall and it's time for this Nebraskan to brush up on her Nebraska writers. It won't really add anything to my reading commitments since both books will work for The Classics Challenge and the Historical Fiction Challenge.

I'm very much enjoying the Bleak House readalong, although I lost track this past week of where I was supposed to finish off reading and read several chapters more than I should have. I'm twelve chapters in, though, and Dickens is still introducing new characters and story lines. It's a lot to keep track of so I'm glad to have the rest of the group to point up things I may have missed along the way.

This week I'm finally getting to my mystery reading, starting off with a review this week of the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery, Elegy for Eddie. I've got another of Jacqueline Winspears' books to read this month in celebration of Maisie Dobbs as well. I'm going to finally get to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, pick up some Harlan Coben, maybe some more Stephanie Plum...who knows where my mystery reading will take me in the next couple of weeks!

What are you reading this week? Do your reading patterns change when the weather changes?