Skip to main content

Still hibernating (sort of) but felt the need to brag

I started and finished reading more than 60 books in January, which is a personal record. Admittedly, most were in the long novella/short novel range (80-120 pages), with a handful as long as 180 pages, but since they are sold as separate eBooks, they still count as entire books. The page count is probably pretty similar to that of an average month. If I manage to keep this up, I might manage to read an average of a book a day for the year, but I expect I will start to slow down as February progresses.

I traded Kindles with a friend and delved into the short romance novels she had collected, mostly series of paranormal-themed novels and one space opera series. This was the reading equivalent of binging on candy - inducing a satisfying rush with lots of calories but little nutrition. But this is just the kind of reading I need at this time of the year: entertaining, with guaranteed happy endings and not much substance. I expect I will probably end up with a massive reading hangover, but it will have been worth it for having kept me from plunging into one of my depression downswings, which tend to happen at this time of the year.

In-between I have been reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Continuing with the food metaphors, it might be likened to a juicy hamburger with the works: still fast food, but with substance and some nutritional value. In fact, I have gleaned several interesting tidbits of science history from it that I want to delve into in more detail, thereby adding some steak to the menu.


Comments

Jono said…
I found you again after a hard drive crash of last fall. I forgot what a voracious reader you are. I'm lucky to read a handful every month. 60 in one month is beyond impressive!
George said…
Yes, very impressive! I went the other way and read James Jones' SOME CAME RUNNING--1,266 pages! The 1959 movie version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine is enjoyable, too. We just experienced the coldest February in 145 years of weather-keeping here in Western NY. The average temperature per day was 11 degrees! We're just like Siberia!

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...