(no subject)
It's May and this is my first post this year about books. How have you managed? I actually checked and the last time I devoted a journal entry to books was December 31st, 2012. It was a neat post at that, one I truly enjoyed crafting, so I hope posting the link here will garner it some additional hits.
Anyway, it's been a slow year for books so far. I started the year with the glamorous, 1930s New York tale Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. It took under a month, keeping me on track for my 2013 goal. Then I embarked on two books at once: On the Map by Simon Garfield and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, a collection of short stories by David Sedaris. I rarely read two books at a time, but I kept the Sedaris in my bag for when I didn't feel like burying my face in geography. By itself, I could have read the Sedaris in a few days, but since I was devoting my attention to the geography book, the combination of the two took me THREE MONTHS. I finished On the Map yesterday at lunch (not wanting to let it creep too far into a fourth month), and then I blasted out the rest of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk later that night.
On the Map was a dense read, but not so dense that I couldn't have knocked it out in a month if I'd been reading every night. It joins the ranks of other normal-sized books that needlessly took me three months to read: The Book Thief and The Corrections. In both cases I still achieved my book goals for the year, so onward and upward.
I was going to open a new book last night, but it was already approaching 1am, so I just went to bed. This morning, I looked at my bookshelf. It only contains about ten books. The rest of my books are currently in boxes in the storage cellar of my apartment-to-be, but I put these ten books aside when I was packing so I'd have easy access to them during the vaguely defined period when I'd be not yet in Brooklyn. Having just finished a behemoth (464 pages, but were they ever), I picked the two thinnest books on the shelf and dropped them into my bag: Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell.
At lunch today I settled on the Ishiguro, leaving a buffer between This American Lifers Sedaris and Vowell.
Anyway, it's been a slow year for books so far. I started the year with the glamorous, 1930s New York tale Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. It took under a month, keeping me on track for my 2013 goal. Then I embarked on two books at once: On the Map by Simon Garfield and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, a collection of short stories by David Sedaris. I rarely read two books at a time, but I kept the Sedaris in my bag for when I didn't feel like burying my face in geography. By itself, I could have read the Sedaris in a few days, but since I was devoting my attention to the geography book, the combination of the two took me THREE MONTHS. I finished On the Map yesterday at lunch (not wanting to let it creep too far into a fourth month), and then I blasted out the rest of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk later that night.
On the Map was a dense read, but not so dense that I couldn't have knocked it out in a month if I'd been reading every night. It joins the ranks of other normal-sized books that needlessly took me three months to read: The Book Thief and The Corrections. In both cases I still achieved my book goals for the year, so onward and upward.
I was going to open a new book last night, but it was already approaching 1am, so I just went to bed. This morning, I looked at my bookshelf. It only contains about ten books. The rest of my books are currently in boxes in the storage cellar of my apartment-to-be, but I put these ten books aside when I was packing so I'd have easy access to them during the vaguely defined period when I'd be not yet in Brooklyn. Having just finished a behemoth (464 pages, but were they ever), I picked the two thinnest books on the shelf and dropped them into my bag: Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell.
At lunch today I settled on the Ishiguro, leaving a buffer between This American Lifers Sedaris and Vowell.