Happy Blogoversary Week & The Sunday Salon!

Welcome to The Sunday Salon! It's a special week on Chick with Books because it's our Blogoversary week! 4 Years ago on February 18th, I created Chick with Books Blog to share my love of reading with "the world" or whoever would be so kind to stop by and take a peek at what I posted. I've met so many wonderful bloggers, readers, authors, publishers, writers, and other bookish people! Thank you to everyone who has stopped by, added a comment, answered my questions about blogging (and there were plenty), read my blog and helped Chick with Books to grow. Thank you to all the publishers and writers who have shared books with me, so that I may share them with others! Thank you to everyone for making it so much fun to talk about books!

So, what do we do with a Blogoversary?! Well, we celebrate! This week I'll be giving away some great bookish things to celebrate, so come back starting Monday to enter the Blogoversary Giveaways! 

Now for some Books that are all the rage this week…

Winter People by Jennifer McMahon… West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother's bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked deeper into the mystery of Sara's fate, she discovers that she's not the only person who's desperately looking for someone that they've lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.

Ever since reading Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon I have been a fan. I loved that book and enjoy Jennifer's writing.  She's a writer who knows how to write a great plot twist and I'm sure we can look forward to a great twist or two in Winter People. Published by Doubleday, it's available now from your favorite bookstore and it's on my wish list!

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman… When Felix Brewer meets Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk at a Valentine’s Dance in 1959, he charms her with wild promises, some of which he actually keeps. Thanks to his lucrative—if not all legal—businesses, she and their three little girls live in luxury. But on the Fourth of July, 1976, Bambi’s comfortable world implodes when Felix, newly convicted and facing prison, mysteriously vanishes. Though Bambi has no idea where her husband—or his money—might be, she suspects one woman does: his mistress, Julie. When Julie disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she’s left to join her old lover—until her remains are eventually found. Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. What he discovers is a tangled web stretching over three decades that connects five intriguing women. And at the center is the missing man Felix Brewer. Somewhere between the secrets and lies connecting past and present, Sandy will find the truth. And when he does, no one will ever be the same.

Laura Lippman is always a great choice when you're in the mood for a great mystery, and After I'm Gone has gotten great press. It would have been on my wish list, but thanks to the nice people at William Morris it is on my nightstand and waiting for me to crack the spine this weekend!

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead… Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

This book has gotten so much buzz this week I just had mention it. I am so curious about it too - will Rebecca Mead's writing live up to all the talk? And in order to really appreciate Rebecca's love letter to Middlemarch, do we need to read the classic by George Elliot first? I've never read Middlemarch and so I just downloaded a copy on the nook. I'm putting My Life in Middlemarch down as a TBR at some point. If you want to read Middlemarch by George Elliot, which is said to be "the ultimate piece of literature", you can download it from Gutenberg.org.

How was your reading week? Did you find any must read books?! I hope you found something good to read here today! And I hope you'll stop by all next week to see what great giveaways I've got planned for my 4 year Blogoversay!

Happy reading… Suzanne