the luminaries / too much to read
I requested The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, from the library, in hopes of reading it for a book club. The library was swamped with requests for it, so I had to wait many weeks and the book club has long since read and discussed it, but my turn finally came up and I now have the ebook version.
I did not realize it is 848 pages. Which would be fine. Long, even for me, but fine. Only the library is still swamped with requests for the title, and ebooks are returned automatically when they are due, no keeping them an extra day to finish up. And since I didn't realize it was so long, I let a couple days pass while I read some other titles, and now I have 11 days to read a very large book.
Which I will manage. But my request for Raising Steam (the most recent Discworld book by Terry Pratchett), also came through, so I have the hardcover version of that, another 365 pages. And I'm somewhere between halfway & 2/3 of the way through Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power, by Dan Hurley. If I don't read any of the notes I've got about 100 pages to go on it (there's 50 odd pages of notes). It looks like I'll be able to renew each of those titles at least once, if I'm lucky, or commit the grave sin of Returning A Library Book Late (an act that sends you to a special hell), so if I need to I can bump them and focus on The Luminaries.
It's just... that's not what I want to do. I want to finish up Smarter while it's relatively fresh in my head, because I've been going at it fairly slowly (non-fiction is harder to read with my daily pain levels). I want to read Raising Steam, because odds are it will entertain me.
I want to read The Luminaries, too. It's supposed to be a good book and meets the criteria for one of my personal challenges. I'm just not sure I want to read it 848 pages worth, not right this second, not without getting to discuss it with the book club, etc.
This makes me feel old.
I did not realize it is 848 pages. Which would be fine. Long, even for me, but fine. Only the library is still swamped with requests for the title, and ebooks are returned automatically when they are due, no keeping them an extra day to finish up. And since I didn't realize it was so long, I let a couple days pass while I read some other titles, and now I have 11 days to read a very large book.
Which I will manage. But my request for Raising Steam (the most recent Discworld book by Terry Pratchett), also came through, so I have the hardcover version of that, another 365 pages. And I'm somewhere between halfway & 2/3 of the way through Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power, by Dan Hurley. If I don't read any of the notes I've got about 100 pages to go on it (there's 50 odd pages of notes). It looks like I'll be able to renew each of those titles at least once, if I'm lucky, or commit the grave sin of Returning A Library Book Late (an act that sends you to a special hell), so if I need to I can bump them and focus on The Luminaries.
It's just... that's not what I want to do. I want to finish up Smarter while it's relatively fresh in my head, because I've been going at it fairly slowly (non-fiction is harder to read with my daily pain levels). I want to read Raising Steam, because odds are it will entertain me.
I want to read The Luminaries, too. It's supposed to be a good book and meets the criteria for one of my personal challenges. I'm just not sure I want to read it 848 pages worth, not right this second, not without getting to discuss it with the book club, etc.
This makes me feel old.