The Blahs

I am just not motivated to post anything lately! It is the case for this blog as well as my About.com site. These last few days of summer are slipping through my fingers, despite trying to hold on to them. All I feel like doing is LOUNGING indulgently in the lack of routine and structure, sleeping in, watching too much TV and blowing off everything.

I finally finished reading The Pillars of the Earth; what a marathon! I started reading it at the beginning of July. If you're not familiar with it, it is a loooong book -- over 900 pages in my copy. It's not that I didn't enjoy the book; it's a great story! But I get tired of reading the same book all the time, so I would switch to other books for a break. We are discussing it at my lunch book club this week, so I finished it just in time.

To clarify: I am in three book clubs. One is my Mother/Daughter Book Club. We only meet in the summer, and only do one or two books. (Looks like it will only be the one for this year, unfortunately.) The other is my Monday Morning neighborhood book club. That meets the first Monday of the month from October through June and has about 25 members from my neighborhood. We met last week to choose the books for the next year.

The third book club meets one Friday a month during the school year, over lunch at someone's house. There are probably 8-10 members; not everyone attends regularly. The host chooses the book for that month. We're doing Pillars of the Earth for September. We gave ourselves all summer to read it, but it will still be interesting to see how many people actually got all the way through to the end.

Mother/Daughter Book Club

Before our lake trip, we hosted an event that I look forward to all year long. It was our 4th annual Mother/Daughter Book Club. I wrote all about the history of our club and this year's selection as a guest contributor at ReadingGroupGuides.com, so you can read all about it here. I truly, truly love this experience, which I hope I conveyed accurately in the article, so I wanted to share it here also.

I highly recommend the book we read - Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. It was a great read. It might be a tad scary for younger readers - I know L would have been freaked out by it even as recently as last year. She's such a worst-case-scenario worry wart!

We're hoping to meet again one more time this summer to do To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm not sure all the girls will get through it in time (especially M&L!!) but we plan to show the movie and even a brief discussion will be worthwhile, since most of the girls will be reading it in English class during the school year.