I hope you’ve all been having a great weekend. I’ve been doing a bit of reading but mainly getting ready for some family members who are visiting this week so I’m going to take a few days off from the blog. I have so much to tell you too as I went to a library sale, have finished and started some books and all other kinds of bookish stuff but I’m going to wait until I have a bit more time. I hope you’ve been reading lots of good stories and can’t wait to catch up with you later in the week.

For now, I’ll leave you with this poem which I read this weekend and really liked.

Happiness by Amy Lowell

Happiness, to some, elation;
Is, to others, mere stagnation.
Days of passive somnolence,
At its wildest, indolence.
Hours of empty quietness,
No delight, and no distress.
Happiness to me is wine,
Effervescent, superfine.
Full of tang and fiery pleasure,
Far too hot to leave me leisure
For a single thought beyond it.
Drunk! Forgetful! This the bond: it
Means to give one’s soul to gain
Life’s quintessence. Even pain
Pricks to livelier living, then
Wakes the nerves to laugh again,
Rapture’s self is three parts sorrow.
Although we must die to-morrow,
Losing every thought but this;
Torn, triumphant, drowned in bliss.
Happiness: We rarely feel it.
I would buy it, beg it, steal it,
Pay in coins of dripping blood
For this one transcendent good.

Know why I love indie bookstores? Because while you’ll still find all the latest bestsellers you can also find books that may get overlooked at the big box stores. Books that definitely sound interesting and should get a bit of share in the spotlight don’t you think?

At our latest bookstore outing these are the books that I added to my list:

• The Impostor by Damon Galgut. From Publisher’s Weekly: In this bleak and thrilling novel, the fifth from Booker Prize-nominee Galgut, the author creates an antipastoral, postapartheid noir that centers around Adam Napier, a depressed poet who retreats to a rural South African town to write.
• Family Sold Separately by Kate Long. From the book: On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Katherine wants only three things: a smidge of social grace, the body of Courteney Cox, and two parents. What she has instead is an almost complete lack of friends, a pudgy figure, and one extremely eccentric, nearly blind grandmother named Poll.
• If the Heart Is Lean by Margaret Luongo. A collection of sixteen stories about people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective.
• The End of an Error by Mameve Medwed. I’ve enjoyed some of her books so I had to add this one to my list which is the story of Lee Emery an empty nester, contentedly married to a man she has known forever and hunkering down in the house where she grew up. She believes she is happy occupying such a familiar emotional and physical space. But questions of the path not taken start to haunt her after she publishes a memoir of her deliciously eccentric grandmother with whom she traipsed through Europe at eighteen.
• The Empanada Brotherhood by John Nichols. Ok, so I added this one because of the title. I love empanadas. And, I love the idea of a zany cast of characters all coming together at an empanada stand.
• The Staff Room by Markus Orths. From the back: A grotesque, absurd satire which is also extremely funny. Kranich is a newly-qualified teacher about to take up his first job. After he arrives at the school, he is plunged into a Kafkaesque environment which has all the worst features of a totalitarian state.

Okay, so some of these aren’t quite independent finds as they are from major publishers but I thought they sounded good and maybe a bit quirky. Have you read any of these?

I hope you all have a great weekend filled with some good reads!