BOOKISH THURSDAY #22: SERENDIPITOUS MOMENTS

Welcome to Thursday, a day that once seemed lost, with nothing exciting happening anywhere.  But then that changed, and today I am celebrating some of the bookish events around the blogosphere, like Lexxie’s Thirsty Thursday & Hungry Hearts; Kimberlyfaye’s TBR Thursday; and Christine’s Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts.

 

 

I am currently reading Paris Runaway, by Paulita Kincer, and my “foodie section” happens back in Florida, where the single mom lives with her two daughters.  In this excerpt, the mother, Sadie, is talking about colleges with her daughter Scarlett.

 

 

 

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“It had been early spring, in the midst of travel soccer season, so most evenings were hectic with practices or games around town.  That night, with no game scheduled and practice finished, we’d been sitting at the round dining room table, my class lesson plans and books pushed to one side, while we ate burritos.  I tried to imitate the burritos at Chipotle, a favorite restaurant of teenagers, by providing rice, black beans, grilled chicken, salsa, cheese, sour cream and lettuce.  Then we each filled our own tortilla shell and folded it shut.

Scarlett sat moving her food around the plate with her fork, probably thinking how much she preferred actual restaurant food.  I kept up a general monologue about my classes and students.  I tried to avoid peppering Scarlett with questions about school and friends.  I wanted to wait for her to “come to me” as the parenting books advise.

“I guess we need to get busy visiting colleges,” I’d said as I put down the burrito, which had begun to deteriorate as beans and rice fell to the plate below.  I decided to attack it with a fork.

“Hmmm,” Scarlett responded.

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I do love burritos, and I enjoyed the conversation between mother and daughter, so typically one-sided.

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My TBR Thursday book is one I’ve had for a while, hiding away in the cloud.  I have had In the Woods, by Tana French, since August 2014.

 

 

What is holding me back from reading this one?  The 600+ pages?  Here’s the synopsis:

 

As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.

Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

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I love murder mysteries, secrets and buried memories.  What do you think?

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My Bookish (and Not So Bookish) Thoughts:

 

• It has been a good week for reading.  I’m on my third book, halfway finished, and so far, all my books are keeping me engaged;
• While writing a blog post earlier, I decided to peek back into the history of that site to see what I’d been writing about in July 2010.  Here is what I found on my July 15, 2010 Potpourri blog:  A Potpourri of Changes.  A pipe had burst in the walls, and my life was in upheaval for the two days it took to fix everything;
• In an August 26, 2010 post, I wrote about some of my collections:  A Quirky Tale.
• Today, I wrote a post on An Interior Journey about my efforts to achieve balance (my One Word for the year), in My Interior World:  Checking My Balance;
• The photo, below, shows my Office Nook where I spend a lot of time; I just ordered a new carpet cover to put under the office chair.  You can’t really see it, but the current one is pretty old and my chair catches on the broken places;

 

• My Netflix viewing has diminished.  After finishing Season 4 of OITNB, I started watching Wallander, but then I lost interest in that one.  Occasionally, I’ve watched a few episodes of Parenthood, which I loved when it was on the networks;
• That’s been my week so far….here’s dinner from a couple of nights ago, at my “new/old” little dining room table;

 

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What did your week look like?  What are you reading, writing, or thinking about?

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