The Sunday Salon: Saying Bye-Bye to May

Haven't written a Sunday Salon post for a few weeks. May has been particularly hectic this year – for some reason I just couldn't settle down to anything for any length of time during the first few weeks of the month. Spring fever, I guess. Well, that and annual mammogram time – I always get a little frantic when health check month rolls around.

And then, of course, there were all those NBA playoff games to attend to.

But that's all done now – everything is OK (if you ignore what happened to the Celtics and the Spurs) and back to normal; so I've been playing catch-up this last week, and trying to make up for lost reading time.

Still, I read seven books in May (counting the one I'm reading now, which I should be finishing up tonight). Here's the list, with links to a couple of reviews:

Brimstone. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
The Optimist's Daughter. Eudora Welty
Ellen Foster. Kaye Gibbons
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Robert C. O'Brien
To Dance with the White Dog. Terry Kay
The Unit. Ninni Holmqvist
Moon Tiger. Penelope Lively (reading now)

And although I haven't reviewed all of those yet, I did post two reviews of books I read earlier this year:

The Master. Colm Toibin
The Great Victorian Collection. Brian Moore

I know I still have a lot of reviews to write, but I'm working on it. Especially since I need to do a wrap-up post for the Book Awards II Challenge which ends tomorrow. Now I need to decide what to read next. Do I go with a book for one of the other reading challenges I've signed up for, or do I get back to Dance of Death, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, which I started a while back and put aside? Or do I start that ARC of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game I've been itching to get to?

Well, I'm really thinking I'll probably go with the Preston/Child – maybe I can make it fit one of my challenges, with a little tweaking. See, I think I've fallen seriously in love with Agent Aloysius Pendergast – he of the ghostly complexion and the perfectly-tailored black suits. And June is a good time for a nice bulky thriller, right? What a nice dilemma – two good books and a whole new month stretching out ahead.