Sunday Salon: Happy Summer!

It's here at last- summer weather in New England. Not every day, and not always perfect, but I'll take what we've been getting lately- warm days, sunshine and dry weather. Except that the dry weather seems to have ended! This weekend was supposed to be Cambridge's annual RiverFest celebration, a day-long arts and community event held on the banks of the Charles River near Harvard Square. It ended up being cancelled due to torrential rain, which was very disappointing. They're not rescheduling, which is too bad. I can imagine it would be next to impossible to get another date, given the hundreds of people involved in organizing it. The bookstore was pretty busy though!

Today I'm reading Pure, by Andrew Miller, a Costa-award winning novel set in pre-Revolutionary France that I'm just loving. Seriously it's a terrific read and I hope those of you into historical fiction get a chance to check it out. It's about an engineer from Normandy who comes to Paris to exhume a gravesite and encounters all kinds of challenges along the way. It's got a great wry humor and I love the engineer and all of his dilemmas.

I've got a couple of other things going as well- Freedom in Exile, the autobiography of the 14th Dalai Lama, and Heat and Dust, the 1975 Booker winner by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. You might know her work from the many screenplays she's written for Merchant/Ivory films. This book is somewhat Merchant/Ivory like; it's about two women in India at different times, on either side of the Raj. I need to jumpstart my Booker reading; I've gotten distracted from it for several months. Also I want to pick up my crime novels and made some headway. I've collected a bunch of them over the past several months and June or July may be the time to dig in. I'm thinking maybe in July, when I go away on a quick trip, would be a good time to dig into some quick reads.

Many of you are headed to New York for BEA this week; yay! Unfortunately I can't make it but I will be participating in Armchair BEA and so my regularly scheduled reviews will be on hiatus for the week. I can't wait to hear about all your stories!

Have a great Sunday! More Sunday Salon here.