Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.

How’s the weather?

We have picture-perfect weather today!

I’ve seen some scary warnings about Monday, but every time that I check the forecast it looks less and less like we’ll get any rain at all, much less thunderstorms and worse.

Instead, it looks like we’ll end April and begin May with the quintessential feeling of spring.

What are you reading?

I reviewed three books since I last posted two weeks ago. That’s a lot for me!

Here are my reviews:

• The Picture House Murders by Fiona Veitch Smith — introduces a mystery series set in inter-war England
• The Oxford Affair by Lynne Kaufman — the first ARC I’ve accepted in years
• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad — winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction

What’s next? I had the opportunity to read Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi, but I decided that I needed a break after One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. So, I suspended that hold for a softer book, the final novel in the Maisie Dobbs series, The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear. I really want to read the Kendi book and I think it will continue my education of how the world really works, so that remains high on my list.

What are you watching or listening to?

We watched Maigret on PBS Passport (a benefit of belonging to our local PBS station). It’s a British production, so I’ll write about it for a future British Isles Friday post. However, it will fit equally well as a Paris in July post, so I wanted to give folks a heads up about that. We really liked it.

What are you doing?

I’m preparing to not shop on Friday. May Day is a general strike to protest the way the world and our country are being run, with no respect for average working people. Workers and students will take real risks to participate. Since I’m not currently working or in school, I can support them by refusing to shop on Friday.

I’ve seen calls for general strikes before in the last year as a way to show the powers-that-be who really has control of the economy. There’s never been enough participation to be effective. This is hard in our country. I’ve seen arguments that maybe it’s impossible. We won’t know until we try and this one has the backing of some of the most active groups in the country. I’m optimistic that it will have some impact and build capacity for future actions.