Sunday Post #8

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer.  It's "a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog."

Reading This Week:

Five books!

• Donna Gephart's middle grade novel, Death By Toilet Paper, which was well worth reading.  
• The Nightingale is faaaar better than the only other Kristin Hannah book I'd read.
• I've had a library copy of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge for quite awhile, and finally got to it the other day.  It's a graphic novel sharing the true stories of five different New Oreleanians (?) and what Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were like for them.  Fascinating.
• Lies I Told, a YA thriller/romance about a family of grifters that adopted two kids to help pull their scams, was fun, but not spectacular.  I'll probably read the next one.
• 37 Things I Love (In No Particular Order) is very different from what I expected from Kekla Magoon.  It was quite moving, but set in what felt like a very white world.  

Blogging this week:

I celebrated finishing my first year at this blog this week.   As a result, I posted a whopping eight times this week!

Monday: I couldn't figure out what to call this post, which was a collection of links to articles about diversity in literature and some of my thoughts about the issue.  But I worked really hard on it!
Tuesday: I launched my celebration with a post about ten experiences I've had because of this blog.  I also posted my sign-up for a summer reading challenge taking place in mid July.
Wednesday: I continued my reflection with a post listing ten posts that I'm proud of from the past year.
Thursday: Since it was June 30, I posted my wrap-up for the month.
Friday: I talked about the YA books I've given five stars to since I started blogging--14 in all.
Saturday: I wrote about who I'm grateful to in my reading/blogging universe, and posted a giveaway that you can still enter!

I spent so much time writing this week that I fell down on commenting, so that's my goal for this week.

Life this week:

A lot of reading and writing!  We got a rare date night--first we stopped over and spent some time chatting with our winemaking friends whose space we'd borrowed for bottling, then we had dinner and played Settlers of Catan with a group of people I used to teach at the high school with.  Since non-teaching spouses were there, and since only three of the six still work together, the teacher-talk wasn't that bad, but since we were all English teachers, there was a lot of lit talk.  (The general consensus: Cormac McCarthy is an author I need to try, Stephen King can be awesome but Pet Semetary is gross, David James Duncan is a god, Don Brown is a hack.)

Yesterday The Winemaker tried to take the girl to a rodeo, but it was sold out, so apparently they're going today instead.  In the meantime, I took the boy to the library so I could keep working on my list of books to order, then we had Thai food and played a game he'd checked out at the library while we sat at the sidewalk table, then I took him to Zootopia at the cheap theater.  A few days earlier, we each had the other kid for an afternoon out, which was also fun.

The Winemaker and I have been watching Nikita on Netflix.  I still prefer the Canadian series, La Femme Nikita, but it's starting to win me over.

That's about it!