Author: Julie

Welcome my Facebook Friends!

Thanks for dropping by my blog. From now on, this is the place where I’ll be posting pictures, short status updates, stories about Bert & Ernie, Raven & Gracie. I’ll share the books I’m reading, my sewing and crocheting projects, home and garden photos, and other stuff that I find interesting.

I hope you’ll drop by often to see what’s happening, and while you’re here I hope you’ll post some comments. This is my personal web space, the content is written by me, the pictures are originally mine.

If you’d like to add your email address to my mailing list to receive a weekly or monthly synopsis of my status updates via email, click one of the links below and complete the form.

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If you have a personal blog, share a link with me and I’ll follow you there.

JD

Current Reading List

Here’s the reading list of the Pulitzer Prize winning books I plan to read over the next several months:

  1. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2007)
  2. The Late George Apley, by John Phillips Marquand (1938)
  3. Less, by Andrew Sean Greer (2018)
  4. The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016)
  5. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (1921)
  6. The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
  7. Honey in the Horn, by Harold L. Davis (1936)
  8. The Reivers, by William Faulkner (1963)
  9. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck (1932)

Sighted the first hummingbird of the season at my feeder this morning!

The Hummingbirds have arrived!

Boiled up several batches of juice and hung out 3 more feeders. Spring has arrived!

If you want to prepare your feeder, all you need to do is boil up some sugar water….It’s 1 part sugar to 4 parts water.  I use some old Classico tomato sauce quart jars, which have 5 evenly spaced lines on the glass, so I fill up to the first line with sugar and then pour a little boiling water over it to melt the sugar.  Then I fill the remainder of the jar with tap water, stir it up and it’s ready for the feeder.

Welcome to the Epilogue Book Club

I’m kicking of the restart of the Book Club to read and share my thoughts on prize winning novels.  Right now I’m reading Pulitzer Prize winning fiction, but I might branch out in the future to include other prize winning books, such as National Book Award books.

Instead of trying to coordinating face to face meeting times with any of my friends who are reading the book, we can discuss the books on the web. Here’s how it can work:

  1. I’ll post a blog entry whenever I start a new book – I’ve already posted a blog entry for our first book here.
  2. If you’ve signed up to receive notifications via email whenever I publish a new blog entry about the Book Club, you’ll receive an email with the name of the book and the date for the “meeting” along with a link to the blog post where we can discuss the book.
  3. Read the book at your own pace, and then post your comments to the blog post that is assigned to the book (see #2 above).  Read and respond to any of the comments at your leisure.
  4. Discussion of the book will conclude when I close commenting on the blog post.

To plan for future reading, I’ve published another article that shows my upcoming reading list.

If you know of any other readers who might be interested in joining the club, please share this article with them and encourage them to sign up!

JD

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Tonight I finished reading this amazing book. The story depicted slavery in a much more brutal way than any other story I can recall reading. As I worked my way through the book, the terms, “white privilege” (a term I have struggled to understand) and “black lives matter” have played over and over again in my mind. I also think of “black holocaust”, a term I had only recently heard, yet as I read of Cora’s experiences and observations in North Carolina, shares so many similarities to the Jewish holocaust.

I need to take a day or two to think about this book and let its story gel in my mind before I can write much more about it. I am appalled and moved beyond description for the things that occurred in this story. I think this is an important book that will stand the test of time and, ad hard as it was to read, I am glad to have read it.

BOOK DISCUSSION LINKS – Please click the three links below to view my thoughts regarding the questions presented:

01 – What were your initial impressions of the book?

02 – What did you think of the characters that Cora encountered?

03 – What did you think of Cora and her situation?

Here’s some additional links about this book that you might find of interest: