Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend and another visit with the Sunday Salon crowd. Today I just want to encourage you to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Read a poem, write a poem or you visit any of these links to find out more about poets and poetry:

• The Best Words in their Order is the blog of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Borzoi Reader will send you a daily poem
• Poetry Foundation offers poems daily via their podcast.

I’m ready to celebrate, I’ve got Poetry Speaks Expanded to listen to while I do some bookbinding today. If you’ve got some great links for poetry please share them.

But, speaking of bookbinding, I went to Paper Arts yesterday to look for decorative paper for a project I’m working on and later in the day when I was back home and relaxing with Leonardo’s Shadow I read a passage that totally made me smile. Giacomo, Leonardo Da Vinci’s servant, goes to the paper merchant.

“The door is open and inside there is paper, paper, paper everywhere! White, green, gray, yellow, light blue. Parchments, all types. Boards, bindings, blocks, and bookmaking materials. The shop has clean white walls, and the large front windows let in plenty of light. Oh, it is a marvelous sight! The shelves are stacked high with clean, fresh, fragrant, inviting paper!”

That was me earlier at Paper Arts. I didn’t need another reason to like this book even more, but I like that Giacomo and I can both get carried away by the sight of beautiful papers. This book has been a delight so far and I hope to spend a bit more time with it today.

I’ve got quite a few things going on this weekend but hopefully I’ll get to spend time with my books. I feel like I’m so behind on my reading, or maybe it’s just that I’ve got a couple of books going on that I’ve been reading for a while now.

I’d like to finish Madame and The Somnambulist. I’m close to the end of both books so hopefully I can tell you more about them soon.

The new books I’d like to start are Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton. So many of you bookish friends have already mentioned this one and it sounds really lovely. The other book I want to dive into is a YA novel about Leonardo Da Vinci, or rather his servant, Leonardo’s Shadow by Christopher Grey. Actually, I did dip into this one just a tiny bit and I can’t wait because I already like what I’ve read so far. Giacomo may just be a servant but he’s got other things planned for himself.

And, that’s not all. I want to do a bit of short story reading and check out Araby by James Joyce for A Curious Singularity and then spend some time with the latest Estella’s Revenge.

Hope everyone has a great start to their weekend and maybe I’ll catch up with you during the Sunday Salon.