It’s Monday! What Are Your Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila of Book Journey. Be sure to check out her post today to see her selections and the list of links to all the other participating bloggers.

Read

Due to an out-of-town family wedding last week, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve participated in the reading meme. A lot has happened, let’s see if I can capture it all!

• I have a new sister-in-law!
• After weeks of reading the book and more weeks sitting on the review, I finally posted Book Review: Watching the English about the fun and fascinating book by Kate Fox.
• I finished Cleopatra: a Life by Stacy Schiff, just in time to give it away. It generated several posts, Musings on Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff, Wondrous Words Wednesday, and Literary Giveaway Blog Hop — Cleopatra. The winner was Sam of Sam Still Reading, so I’m packing up the book to send to Australia! I really like her book review format and have added her blog to my Google Reader. As that was all happening, I realized that my husband expected to read the copy that I just put up in a giveaway. Oops! Fortunately, I won the contest for another copy at MamaSick, Review and Contest for Cleopatra, A Life. A flurry of tweets surrounded this, including this lovely bit from the author: 
• I explained the reason that I was only spending part of the day on Dewey’s Read-a-Thon because of A Busy Saturday. I did no preparation for the Read-a-Thon except for putting up two posts about reading to get into the spirit. A guest post by Kathy Carlton Willis, A Reading Tale — Guest Post and my memory of our home town Carnegie library, Louisiana Public Library. When Kathy posted our pieces on her blog she included a photo of the library taken by her brother: Stories of Two Readers for Dewey’s Read-a-Thon Day. Then there was the obligatory massive updated post, Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, and my Dewey’s Read-a-Thon Wrap Up.

So, what did I actually read in all of that time? As I said, I finished Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, which was a fascinating picture of a powerful woman and, even more interesting, of how and why the myth diverted from the reality. I finished The Art of Eating In by Cathy Erway. The review will be my Weekend Cooking post in a couple of weeks — the short version is it wasn’t quite what I expected, but I really enjoyed it anyway. I started and finished Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning and need to get that review up as part of my RIP VI challenge.

Reading

I’m currently reading Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes about the East St. Louis race riot in 1917. Our Diversity Book Club will be discussing it on Thursday. I ran into several of our members at the diversity symposium on Saturday (pdf flyer). The consensus is that it’s a tough book to read because of the topic but it’s going to generate a terrific discussion. I only have 50 more pages, so no problem getting it finished before our meeting.

Never Been a Time proved too serious to read for all of Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, so I started Ghouls Gone Wild by Victoria Laurie, which is light and fun and perfectly themed as we go into Halloween week. It wasn’t on my original RIP VI list but following Anastasia’s lead at Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog (The Sunday Salon (Oct. 23): RIP VI update), I’m going to count it.

Will Read

What’s next? Beats me! I have a lot of books around here and my plan for today includes visiting my nearest indie bookstore, Pudd’nhead Books, with list in hand. Check back next week to see what I ended up being in the mood for.