I hope everyone had a great weekend. Mine was a bit of a blur what with all the bookbinding I was doing but I did finish Dreaming in Cuban for the upcoming Slaves discussion. Don’t forget that’s this Wednesday if you want to participate.

I also got to read a bit in a new poetry book by Sourcebooks, The Poem I Turn To. This collection has a wide variety of poems and it even has a CD so you can hear some of the poems. I love listening to poetry. I’ll share one poem from the collection which I really liked. I feel like so many things are going on with me right now that this poem really resonated with me. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Moving Forward
By Rainer Maria Rilke

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

I stole this meme from Danielle who got it from Simon. Make an alphabetical list of some favorite books and authors. For some letters, I had a lot of authors to choose from and for others I had to really think about it. Anyway, this was fun.

• Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid’s Tale
• Booth, Martin – Islands of Silence
• Cisneros, Sandra – Caramelo
• Donoghue, Emma – Slammerkin
• Esquivel, Laura – Like Water for Chocolate
• Fitzgerald, Penelope – The Bookshop
• Gaarder, Jostein – Sophie’s World
• Hill, Susan – The Woman in Black
• Irving, John – A Prayer for Owen Meany
• Japrisot, Sebastien – A Very long Engagement
• Kingsolver, Barbara – The Bean Trees
• Lansens, Lori – The Girls
• Mistry, Rohinton – Family Matters
• Niffenegger, Audrey – The Time Traveler’s Wife
• Olsson, Linda – Astrid & Veronika
• Pym, Barbara – Jane and Prudence
• Q – Nothing…
• Rice, Anne – Interview with the Vampire
• Shapiro, Jeff – Renato’s Luck
• Toole, John Kennedy – A Confederacy of Dunces
• Urrea, Luis Alberto – The Hummingbird’s Daughter
• Vreeland, Susan – Artemisia
• Waters, Sarah – Affinity
• X – Nothing…
• Yoshimura, Akira – Shipwrecks
• Zusak, Markus – The Book Thief

It was fun to come up with this list because I got to think back on the books I’ve read. Some of these favorites I read ages ago (I wonder if I’d still like them the second time around and so many years later) and some are a lot more recent.
Who else has done this or wants to play?