Yes, you know what April is. It’s National Poetry Month! I meant to post tonight about the book for discussion but I was sidetracked by bookbinding today so I didn’t finish the book but I promise I’ll finish it tonight and post soon.

So back to National Poetry Month. You know what makes me so excited about this? It’s a chance to get everyone talking about poetry, maybe finding some local poetry slams and hopefully discovering more new poets.

There are tons of resources on the Poets.org site where you can even sign up to have a poem delivered to your inbox daily. You can also check out Poetry Daily to read a poem a day. And for those of you who enjoy children’s poetry, thanks to Gentle Reader, I found out about 30 Poets/30 Days. It looks like a wonderful project so be sure to check it out along with the others.

So do you have plans to celebrate? I am planning to read The Captain’s Verses by Pablo Neruda. I’ve read a poem here and there from this book but this month I plan to read the whole book. Plus, it’s also one of my challenge reads. And, I’m sure to read more poems by some of my favorite poets like Billy Collins, Sandra Cisneros, Linda Pastan, Mary Oliver and many more. Who are some of your favorites? Tell me, I want to add more names to my list.

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Mine was wonderful, I went to two bookstores (yay) but believe it or not, I didn’t buy anything. I wish I could say the same for the husband. heh.

I did spend quite a bit of time reading but I didn’t get to most of the books in my previous picture post, aside from When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I’m loving that book. I did start a very good mystery, The Last Kashmiri Rose by Beverly Cleverly. This is one of those books that I’d been meaning to get to for a long time and so far I can say it was well-worth the wait but more on it later.

Most of the weekend I spent it reading The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. It’s a wonderful character study about a woman who has been living a dreary life after the war and once she gets a chance at a week full of pleasure, riches and so on she “awakens”. Of course she has to go back to her real life of work and pinching pennies and well, you can only imagine how that must make her feel. I’m hoping to finish this book just in time for The Slaves of Golconda discussion on Tuesday so feel free to drop in on the conversation and hear more about the book or if you’ve read it then share your thoughts.

So that’s about it on the reading front for me but I had to leave you with some very cool links I’ve recently found.

• Did you know that only about 3% of all books published in the U.S. are works in translation? Well, boost your knowledge of foreign literature by checking out Three Percent.
• Want to know what the 25 most influential books of the past 25 years are? Check out the March/April issue of Mental Floss magazine. I see some Atwood, Morrison and Murakami.
• Remember covering your schoolbooks with kraft paper? Well, thanks to Book City Jackets you can do that again but with a bit more style. Right now they only have Fiction, Favorite and Non-Fiction. I think Poetry should be next given that National Poetry Month is just around the corner don’t you think?