Things To Do: Summer 2012 Edition: Update and Books

In this Memorial Day weekend post, I posted a list entitled “Things To Do: Summer Edition.”

Here’s my list with the ones I have completed and already wrote about crossed off:

1. savor red red
tomatoes selected at a farmer’s market
2. sip margaritas on my balcony with my
girlfriends visiting during the middle of July
3. have a perfect beach or pool day
4. go out of town (even if just
for the day or an evening, even if just to Annapolis
or Baltimore)
5. go for a snowball with friends
6. have a professional
pedicure and then show it off in strappy sandals
7. become a bookworm–read
a book a week
8. attend as many cookouts as
possible–thoroughly enjoy summer food while dining
alfresco
9.
create a pasta salad to be a signature of mine
10. throw a fun and fabulous
party
11.
get just a bit of a tan
12. totally
rock big Italian-style sunglasses
13.
make a cork candle holder– collect the corks needed by Labor Day and the end of
summer

As you can see, despite a limited budget and it being my busy season at work, I have made the most of this summer anyway. Life is about thoroughly enjoying the little things.

I feel like I can cross this one off my list too…

7. become a bookworm–read a book a week

I wrote that I was starting “Un Amico Italiano: Eat, Pray, Love in Rome” by Luca Spaghetti in a previous post. I laughed the whole way through. He is truly an over-the-top Roman. Read it and let him captivate you.

I just finished “The Last Time I Saw Paris” by Elizabeth Adler and loved it! This novel was half romance half French travel narrative. It became a book I couldn’t put down. I simply picked this up off the shelf at my local library. In looking at her other, similar titles on Amazon, it seems I might enjoy her other work…

I have another novel, another plucked off a library shelf, on my nightstand which I will probably read while waiting for the recently released book that I have in my queue, “Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child” by Bob Spitz. I had heard about this book from this post from the blog The Simply Luxurious Life. My hold is the 16th request, so I hope that my turn comes soon! This blogger, Shannon, also recommended “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris” by David McCullough which I might check out from my local library… It reminds me of a book I read during the middle of July “Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis” by Alice Kaplan, who I had read before. This is a scholarly work that is fascinating, sure, but is simply not light summer reading. I should have saved this for later. I found out about it from the international education listserv I subscribe too. I also half read half skimmed a Coco Chanel biography, but found it too dense as well.

When I first created the to do list, I posted this image: