Sunday Salon (1:5)

RBR Sunday Salon

Volume 1, Issue 5

This second week of September might mean Pumpkin Spice lattes and early autumn feelings for many North Americans, but here at Roof Beam Reader it means 108-degree temperatures and another Sunday Salon!

This week, in addition to recapping my own posts and sharing what I’m currently reading, I’m sharing my favorite reads from my favorite bloggers, as well as a number of fascinating articles from across the web, including some on science, history, and politics.

I look forward to hearing about what you’ve read/written this week, or what you think about the links I’ve shared. Please feel free to comment below. Happy September!

Blog Posts I Loved

• Wild Moo Books: Wrap Up: Big Book Summer Challenge. “Back in June I enthusiastically jumped into my friend Sue’s Big Book Summer Challenge. The challenge was to read books over 400 pages long between Memorial Day and Labor Day.”
• Interesting Literature: The Pit and the Pendulum and the Short Story: “Of these lesser-known Poe tales, the one that stood out to me was ‘The Domain of Arnheim’, in which Poe seems to lay out his artistic credo in the form of a work of fiction. It’s a love letter to the imagination and a late-Romantic expression of the primacy of the human imagination, describing an imaginary voyage through a poet’s mind.”
• An Historian About Town: Creating Your Library. “While this is a lovely dream to have, it isn’t as easy as it might seem on the surface, and there is a lot to consider. For a lot of people, it is a way to establish their intellectual self in their home.”

Literary Miscellany

• Literary Hub: 10 Great Reads from the Feminist Lesbian Sci-Fi Boom of the 1970s: “It was the mid-70s, and I was in my mid-twenties—immersing myself in feminism and coming out—when (from my point-of-view) women, often lesbians, simply took over science fiction. Women had always been there, but the sheer volume of mind-twisting feminist plots and not-creepy lesbian characters on bookstore shelves was heady stuff.”
• BBC: The Woman behind Africa’s ‘Harry Potter’ [Video]: “Inspired by her Nigerian heritage, Children of Blood and Bone is full of adventure, with giant lions, epic fight scenes and Yoruba incantations, and is being turned into a movie.”

History & Politics

• NPR: Obama Campaigns, The Op-Ed. [Audio] “Former President Obama was back campaigning for Democrats, while President Trump is still focused on an anonymous op-ed.”
• NBC: Women Watched Trump Toss the Political Playbook. Now They’re Setting it on Fire. “But equally notable is how many of the hundreds of mostly Democratic women running are political outsiders, tossing the old playbook aside that said female candidates have to be twice as qualified, twice as polished, and twice as careful as their male counterparts to run.”

Culture & Society

• Forbes: Women Earn More Collegee Degrees and Men Still Earn More Money. “Despite the tremendous educational gains that women have achieved, men still earn higher wages, virtually across the board. Since the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963 – when women earned an average of 59 cents for every dollar paid to a man – the gender pay gap has narrowed by less than half a cent per year, to about 80 cents on the dollar today.”
• Slate: Apple Follows Twitter’s Lead, Permanently Bans Alex Jones’ Infowars From App Store. “The right-wing provocateur Alex Jones has one fewer digital platform to peddle his crazy conspiracy theories after Apple decided to remove Infowars from its App Store late Friday. The company took down a total of five apps that were affiliated with Infowars.”

Science, Tech., & Nature

• NewScientist: A Giant Pool Noodle to Clean Up Ocean Plastic Launches Today: “On Saturday, engineers plan to tow a gigantic floating boom out of San Francisco Bay, past Alcatraz prison, and to the open ocean. It is destined to begin cleaning up the mountains of plastic rubbish circulating in the Pacific. But is this the right way to do it?”
• The Wall Street Journal: Your DNA, Your Diet: How Nutrition is Being Personalized. “Cynthia Fife-Townsel, a Chicago librarian, had been researching nutrition and DNA profiling to help her understand her body and improve her health. So when she saw an advertisement offering an at-home DNA and blood-test kit from a company called Habit for just $200, she decided to give it a try.”

Teaching & Writing

• Brevity: Still Waiting for That Contract: On Being a “Real” Writer. “I gave up on leading a life on stage, the life of an artist, the life I had always wanted. I committed to a policy of practicality and went to business school. Through all that time, I was writing.”
• Kristen Lamb: Back to School: Why Great Papers, Essays, and Blogs Need Outlines. “Once I mastered how to outline an academic paper, it was like I was unstoppable. Yes, I know. This sounds like the Passion of the Nerd. In reality though, it’s more like the Redemption of the Procrastinator. But, becoming a master outliner helped me write papers faster and get better grades every time.”

Posts from Roof Beam Reader

• Folio Friday: The Left Hand of Darkness
• Dorian Gray, In Theory: Part 3

Currently Reading

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• So Big by Edna Ferber (for #CCSPIN)

Thank you for stopping by and taking part in another SUNDAY SALON. There was much to choose from this week, and I hope I have presented you with a decent selection. Some of these I found interesting and engaging, others troubling and bothersome. I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these or the other things you’ve read this week!

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