SUNDAY POTPOURRI: ANNOYANCES, GREAT BOOKS, & BLOGGIESTA

Welcome to Sunday Potpourri!  It has been a strange week, and the weekend has been full of Bloggiesta stuff!  I love that event, though, as it gives me the opportunity to do what I love best about blogging:  revamping a blog!

Check out my Weekly Updates, for some of the fabulous reads I enjoyed, like Small Blessings and Big Little Lies.

I am probably the last person in Blogland to figure out how to participate in a Twitter party, but there is one going on in a few minutes for Bloggiesta, and I’m going to try.

How does it work?  I shall soon find out…or not.

Meanwhile, last week, except for the fabulous books I read, was a total wash.  Waited around for the maintenance people to show up…and they finally did at 10:00 a.m. on Friday.

Surprisingly, the man was very respectful of my things, but the woman, whom I had never met, pushed her way in rudely, not even introducing herself, and started poking around in places she didn’t need to be.  She disturbed the curtains and blinds and did not put them back the way they were.  She had that look that I can only describe as “haughty social worker”—which was not me when I did that job!—and made me wonder why she was so weird.  She wasn’t supposed to be there to check my housekeeping…LOL.  Which was fine, by the way. 

 

 

I followed along, fixing what she disturbed, and then they left pretty quickly, only changing the filters, etc.

I waited all week for that?  I wanted to complain about the woman, but decided it would be better to RANT.  LOL

Well, that is over, and today I’m enjoying a new book that has totally engaged me:  The Unwitting, by Ellen Feldman.

 

 

In CIA parlance, those who knew were “witting.” Everyone else was among the “unwitting.”  

On a bright November day in 1963, President Kennedy is shot. That same day, Nell Benjamin receives a phone call with news about her husband, the influential young editor of a literary magazine. As the nation mourns its public loss, Nell has her private grief to reckon with, as well as a revelation about Charlie that turns her understanding of her marriage on its head, along with the world she thought she knew.

With the Cold War looming ominously over the lives of American citizens in a battle of the Free World against the Communist powers, the blurry lines between what is true, what is good, and what is right tangle with issues of loyalty and love. As the truths Nell discovers about her beloved husband upend the narrative of her life, she must question her own allegiance: to her career as a journalist, to her country, but most of all to the people she loves.

Set in the literary Manhattan of the 1950s, at a journal much like the Paris Review, The Unwitting evokes a bygone era of burgeoning sexual awareness and intrigue and an exuberance of ideas that had the power to change the world. Resonant, illuminating, and utterly absorbing, The Unwitting is about the lies we tell, the secrets we keep, and the power of love in the face of both.

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After reading the book about Sylvia Plath in the Summer of 1953 (Pain, Parties, Work) I feel as though I am actually back in that era.  The 50s and 60s were strange times.

 

So I’m off to keep reading…after I try to figure out this Twitter Party thing!    What is your day looking like?

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