Wondrous Words Wednesday

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme, started by Bermudaonion where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. Feel free to join in the fun. Kathy from Bermudaonion won the BBAW award for Most Concise blog, so make sure you visit and congratulate her (if you haven't done so yet).

Today's words are coming from my book club's choice for this month, The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner.

picayune - 1. a: a Spanish half real piece formerly current in the South b: half-dime 2. a: something trivial, of little value b: petty, small-minded

This is how it's used in the book:

And from train windows Bo looked out over fields of flax in flower, acres and acres of blue, and then his brewery job, full of travelling as it was, seemed trivial, picayune, confining.(p. 31)

flickertail - a ground squirrel chiefly of the north-central U.S. and adjacent Canada

Here's how it's used:

Flickertails jerked and ran and sat up with absurd little hands hanging on their chests.(p.36)

It's Monday...and it's time for Borrowed Words.

The school started, my beautiful girl is growing up, soon she will tell me she's not a kid but a teenager, and to watch her change from a little child to a growing up girl puts me in a sentimental mood. This very mood made me read what famous people had to say about youth. I give you words borrowed from Franklin Rossevelt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Logan Pearsall Smith, George Bernard Shaw & Oscar Wilde:

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, Sec. 297

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Check this out! Historical Fiction events going on all week.

Lucy over at Enchanted by Josephine, in collaboration with other wonderful historical fiction bloggers, decided to celebrate history and historical fiction throughout the whole week of September 14th. There are going to be guest post, interviews and giveaways. You can read about all the details, as well as who's participating when you visit Enchanted by Josephine blog here (which, btw is enchanting).

I am especially looking forward to posts about the death of Cleopatra and about Mary Queen of Scots (whom I happen to favor over Elizabeth I, believe it or not).

August Reads

Wow! I can't believe that summer has come and gone. It was a very weird time for me this year. Usually I look forward to the summer time but this time I am glad it's over. I also find myself liking autumn more and more. Or, at least the month of September when the temperatures are breezy 70's and 60's, the sun is still shining and the leaves start turning colors. Because the months of July and August did not allow me for a lot of 'me' time, I couldn't read a lot of books. But the ones I did read in August were satisfying enough.

1. Morrigan's Cross by Nora Roberts - part one in the Circle of Six trilogy and my first Nora Roberts' experience, even though not in the genre that made her famous.

2. Blood On His Hands by Mark P. Sadler - a promising debut thriller and I will definitely be looking for more from this author.

3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would after having watched the dreadful movie by the same title.

4. Cell by Stephen King - what can I say, it's King! I'm not gonna lie, he is my fave and I have yet to read a book of his I didn't enjoy.

5. From a Whisper to a Scream by Charles de Lint - a surprise horror from an author I have always thought to be a sci-fi writer, but a successful genre transition nonetheless.

6. The Case Has Altered by Martha Grimes - I have a special fondness for British detective mysteries that are part of a series (think P.D. James, M.C. Beaton, Elizabeth George) and I am very thrilled to find that Martha Grimes doesn't disappoint and there are plenty of books featuring Richard Jury yet to be read by me, yay!

7. Threshold by Bonnie Kozek - that was a tough book to read. It was a very fine, hard-boiled thriller but not for everyone, since there is a lot of shocking violence (even for me) and while I liked it, I will have to wait quite a while before I am ready to read another one of this kind.

Wondrous Words Wednesday

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme, started by Bermudaonion where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. Feel free to join in the fun.

I have a couple of words from my current read, God Is An Englishman by R.F. Delderfield, which I had no idea existed but it was fun to find out what they meant.

1. Jerrybuilder - someone who builds cheap buildings out of poor materials on speculation for a quick profit

2. Salubrious – favorable to or promoting health; healthful.

How they are used in the book:

After that the jerrybuilders had swarmed in to run up their rows of back-to-back streets that often bore pastoral names but were, for all that, salubrious than the foetid alleys that ran inland from the wharves of Wapping and Rotherithe.