The Sunday Salon: My first, with a giveaway!

You know how all the cool people do something that looks cool and you always feel too dorky to ask to join in? Well finally, I'm going to do the Sunday Salon with the rest of the cool peeps. (Is "peeps" still cool? I don't know. Mmm sugary goodness.) I'm finally starting to get a rhythm going again with reading, and I hope having a regular posting schedule will help. I plan to blog more too, I'm sure you're all excited.

This week I finished reading Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside by Katrina Firlik. I love memoirs that show a life I'll never lead. I love learning the fascinating details that you'd never hear in a book about something else. I have a huge stack of these waiting for me, some of them were gifts/contest winnings from some of you- A Piece of Cake and Queen of the Road, for example. Anyway, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe is about Firlik's experiences as a neurosurgeon. It has a lot of potential as an interesting book, but in the end it kinda falls short. Firlik seems to lack some of the cues to make a person empathetic, even though she takes great pains to emphasize her great bedside manner. She is arrogant and a bit conceited, clearly thinks she's better than her readers due to being a brain surgeon, and even more so for being female. The chapters are only vaguely cohesive, one anecdote running headlong into the next before she finishes the point in the first. Regardless of this, I read the book over the course of a couple of days because I found the idea of reading about brain surgery fascinating. I finished it early in the week, and even now can't remember what I learned from it.

Next I read the short story by Patricia Briggs about Anna and Charles from On the Prowl, and got a good start into Cry Wolf. It is excellent, and I'd have finished it last night except I left my bag at the hospital while visiting a relative and haven't had a chance to go back for it.

Because this is October and signs of Halloween are appearing everywhere, I've considered limiting my reading to my insane backlog of spooky and paranormal stories. I know there are a couple challenges out there dedicated to this, but is anyone else thinking of just reading on topic like this? I have some Laurell Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Jim Butcher, Rachel Caine, the last Carrie Vaughn, along with some new to me authors sitting in the TBR. I could so easily make it the entire month, especially now that I only manage a couple books a month. (I'm trying to rectify that, too.)

Last month I read and reviewed The Thirteenth Tale. Because this is my first Sunday Salon and it's a respectably spooky tale, I'm gonna give it away! If you're one of the 4 people in blog land who has not read it, please leave a comment and I'll draw for it next Sunday in my second Sunday Salon. It is not in pristine condition, but is definitely not worn. I tried to give away A Nation of Wimps a few weeks ago, and had not ONE taker, so if you're reading this and want that, let me know and I'll draw for it too.

My plans for today: go get and finish reading Cry Wolf, clean my house so my father-in-law can visit, get a little sewing done for tomorrow's Etsy update, and list this Halloween bag in the shop (It's gonna be cheap, it has a tiny flaw on the back that bothers me!) What are your plans for today? Are you reading anything spooky for October? Have you read Cry Wolf?