Back in town!

Hi all!  Sorry to have been MIA for such a long period, but I've been doing the summer thing. I was out of town for nearly 2 weeks enjoying sun and fun with family and friends.

I wish I had some deep and insightful thing to say right now, but my brain is still in summer-jell-o-mode.  How's that for invoking an image??!

I will say, however, I've been keeping up with my reading better than my writing, and that is not something that feels good.  Like needing food or water, I need to write to feel my healthiest and to survive.  Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration with the survival statement, but I do feel at my best when I'm writing productively.  I can't wait to get back into my writing groove!! School starts in 2 weeks on my end, so kids will be off for the days and I'll be busy writing my heart out.

But back to the reading end of things for me.  Right now I'm reading a book that's based during a time period and a country I rarely ever read about. It's quite an interesting change for me, and the book is good so far. It's called The Red Scarf by Kate Furnivall, and it's a story about a young women who has lived then escaped life in a Labor camp in Siberia in 1933 (Stalin's rule).  I have a passion for stories (mostly based on true events) that rise from the concentration camps during Hitler's period.  This passion comes from my intense fascination of the story of human survival in unbelievable circumstances. I can't seem to get enough of these heartbreaking yet triumphant story lines.  Keep in mind, it's not the mistreatment of humans I like to read about, it's their triumphant survival I thrive on.

It's disgusting and surprising how many stories throughout history and the world so closely simulate the "Jewish story" of opression and survival.

Here is a description of what the Red Scarf is about:
Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.

After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, she?s nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refuge?she also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. He?s everything she has ever wanted?but he belongs to Anna.

After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, family?even a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold dear?
I'm looking forward to reading another book from Kate Furnival called The Russian Concubine, however, for right now, I plan to read something far lighter. I like to alternate heavy and light.

What books are you reading now?  And why?  ;)