Since I did a couple of musings on reading posts already this week — asking about a perfect reading month and thinking about reading and remembering and forgetting — I think this post is going to be just a little bit random.
I haven’t done much reading this weekend because Boyfriend and I did a Lord of the Rings movie marathon. This was a big deal because I’ve been pretty adamant with him about how much I dislike those movies (don’t shun me!). The first time I watched them I thought they were too long and too confusing — I’ve never read the books, so I just got lost. But this time I actually focused, asked questions, and ended up enjoying them, even if we did stay up until 1:30 in the morning finishing the last one.
Sunday Salon
I think when I read too many review copies of books in a row, I start to get a little stir crazy. February was the month I planned to focus on review books, and I read five of them, with a couple library books in the middle for good mix. I read review copies with a little more focus than books I’m just reading because I want to, which I think gets tiring.
This week I decided to take a little break — TBR Dare, be damned! Forget you, overflowing bookshelf! Get away, review copies! I want to read freely and at random.
I am happy to report that I finally got over the reading slump I wrote about last Sunday, and actually finished three books this week.
Despite finally getting over my slump, I probably won’t get a lot of reading done today. My book club is meeting to discuss The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, and then right after that boyfriend and I are heading to our wine tasting group. It should be a fun day, even without a lot of reading.
This is a weird Sunday Salon post to write, since I actually haven’t finished a book since I wrote about The Happiness Project last Sunday. That feels so out of character for me, since I normally finish one or two books in a week.
The biggest reason I haven’t finished anything is because I couldn’t find the motivation to read the book I started last Sunday — Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubenstein, L’Oréal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good by Ruth Brandon, a book I received for review from Harper.
I have been on the library hold list for Gretchen Rubin’s memoir, The Happiness Project, for months. So when the book came into the library a day after Madison was smashed with a giant blizzard, I didn’t think twice about trekking through the cold and snow to go pick it up the first chance I got.
I also walked through the bitter cold to a local indie bookstore to pick up the copy of War and Peace they special ordered for me so I could join a War and Peace Read-Along, but that’s just because I’m crazy.
This Sunday has been pretty slow, but in a good way. I spent the morning finishing up my eighth book of the month, The Postmistress by Sarah Blake, which capped off a great month of reading. I spent the early part finishing up the nonfiction reads for the Indie Lit Awards, plus some other nonfiction I’ve been excited about for awhile.
It’s 9:15 on Sunday night, and I’m calling it a weekend on my Bloggiesta plans. I had 25 things on my To Do List, and in all I managed to cross off all but five of them. Given that I spent Friday at work and a soccer game and Saturday prepping for a birthday party, I’d say that is pretty darn awesome.
If you’re reading this in a feed reader, take a second and pop over to the site to see the face lift I gave it. Nothing drastic, but I did update the header, change the font, move and update the columns, and move the navigation bar. I like it a lot.
I recognized myself, at least a former version of myself, in this story — the kind of girl that goes into used bookstores or clearance sections not really looking for anything, just exploring what is there. I loved both the feeling of finding a book I’ve wanted for awhile unexpectedly, or picking up something I didn’t even know I wanted to read. I did the same thing at the library. I never had books on hold for me, I simply went and wandered the stacks and came out with a pile of books to explore when I got home.
I’ve had a couple of really uncharacteristic reading weeks over the last month. It started back in November when I realized that I could spend basically all of November and December reading whatever I wanted because I was done with reading commitments for the year.
I decided to finish all of the books I’d borrowed from people over the last several months, which I managed to do really quickly because I went unplugged for awhile. Since then, I’ve been on a literary fiction reading kick, which has been really abnormal and a lot of fun.
Last Sunday Salon I mentioned that I was hosting the wine tasting group I’m a part of, WASTED. The theme for the night was “Wine and Literature,” so everyone brought a wine that went with a particular book passage. There were a lot of good wines, and it was fun to listen to everyone read their particular book passages.
We started out with a Guenoc Victorian Claret, a red wine that I picked out because the wine shop employee told me it was the kind of wine that characters in a Jane Austen novel would drink. It tasted a bit like tobacco and cherry, pretty good.
