Sunday Coffee in a Moonlit Chair

I'm having my Sunday coffee awfully late this week.  I feel like I'm just getting my reading mojo back.  Still waiting on my blogging mojo.  If you are a gentle reader and are bearing with me, bless you!

This week was such a busy one--but I managed to get up my post of my review of Hummingbirds, and for The Story on Thursdays I posted about Isaac Babel.  If you haven't heard of Babel or read him yet, please find these two stories and read them:  "My First Goose" and "The Story of My Dovecote."  If you don't do this I will haunt you.

Speaking of haunting:  I didn't get to participate in Top Ten Tuesday this week. So here is my list of Top Ten Books for Halloween:
1.  Not a book but a short story:  "The Man in the Black Suit" by Stephen King.  It is a chillingly ordinary story about the day a young boy goes fishing and meets the devil.
2. Another short story--this one by Dennis Lehane.  It's called "After Gwen" and was in a Best Mystery Stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates.  Bone-chilling.
3.  One last short story:  Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat."  Nuff said.
4.  In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  A brilliant book that transcends genre.
5. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. A work of genius.
6.  Dracula by Bram Stoker.  I just got the big illustrated annotated version and it is fabulous.
7.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  Some scenes in this book still haunt me.
8. The Passage by Justin Cronin.
9. The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell.  A zombie book written in the style of Faulkner!
10.  The book that scared me out of my adolescent mind:  The Exorcist.


I'm always happy after I finish a Top Ten Tuesday list.  I don't know why, but there is something just so satisfying about making a list.

Yesterday and today I just read, read, read.  I finished two books:  The Small Room by May Sarton and Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. More on each of these soon.  Eating Animals was a review copy sent by the publisher, and The Small Room I read because of Judith at Reader in the Wilderness.

I'm just getting around to hopping around to see who is on the book blog hop this week.  I always find at least a few new blogs to follow, but often I just find myself stopping in on old friends.  I feel like I haven't been a very good blogosphere neighbor lately:  if you gave me an award, or have been faithfully commenting, please know that I really do appreciate you.  It's just that October somehow became a out-of-control clunker of a month.  You know how some days/weeks/months the obligations just pile up like there's no tomorrow?  And sometimes there really is no tomorrow, like when grades are due by 3:00 or you have to be at school until 8:00 pm.  And then it's November, and there are all these pleasingly colored squares on your district calender that mean no school, and you think "I could have used a few of these in October!"

Oh, and I wrote this entire post with a headache curled up like a hedgehog right behind my right eye.  The hedgehog has been there all day!

So, gentle readers, how was your October?  Is November looking better?  Are you participating in NaNoWriMo (I think I am)?  Can you believe the way the year is almost gone?  Nothing like November for that Chrysanthemum wistfulness.