The Month in Review and of Thing to Come

My least favorite time of year is over and that's a good thing.  Holidays aside, December was a rather dull month (and all the activity that the holiday did bring wasn't exactly positive nor exciting).  As you can tell from my blogging activity I haven't been reading a whole bunch.  It's an odd lull I'm in.  I know that I've never done well reading more than one book at a time, yet that is what I'm doing at the present.  Stranger still, I'm really enjoying them both books I'm currently reading: I just don't really feel like reading a bunch at the moment and I don't think forcing myself to do so will yield positive results either.

I received one book--as in one--for Christmas.  This fact throws into the sharpest of relief how poorly the people who claim to know me best know me.  So a great big ole thank you and internet hugs to Maria for Divergent by Veronica Roth.  I'm excited about this book for two reasons: I know nothing about it, and my sister is starting it soon so we can read it together.     

When I get back to How to Read Literature LIke a Professor I don't think I'll be any worse off for the time away, but I can admit I'm doing an injustice to How to Paint a Dead Man.  As I said before, both are very good and in the case of the latter by Sarah Hall I'll certainly be looking into more of her books, reading just ain't a priority right now.  

I saw the second part of The Hobbit and was bored to the point of near constipation.  I saw Ender's Game and was pleasantly surprised.  Movies are all well and good, but it's getting harder and harder for me to justify the money for the theatre experience.  

I had really good intentions last month with outlining my reading goals and expectations for this month but yeah… none of that happened.  No big surprise that I'll pass on making similar statements for January, but I am expecting to read a lot of science fiction in the near future.  That's both exciting and scary.  I'll hope for the best.    

The strangest and best news of the month came a from a friend who I convinced to read the Sinai Tapestry by Edward Whittemore.  She loves it and I knew she would, but she's not reading it, she's listening to it as an audio book!  A writer who has been twice out of print now not only has a third chance at deserved attention but a new generations treatment at that.  

I've said it before: read Wittemore.

Month in Review

The greatest thing that happened in November may have been the greatest thing to happen this year: I found a new used book and it is quite literally right across the street.  I thought Bookmiser went out of business no less than twelve years ago, seems they only moved to a new location and never told me about it.

It's odd for me to go to a used book store and have zero store credit but hopefully that will soon change; it's not as if lack of credit impeded me from buying…  This store is beautiful.  New and used together on the same shelve; immaculate organization, neat, clean, tidy as could be (and if you've ever been in one of 'those other' kind of used bookstores you'll know the value of neat clean and tidy although I'll be the first to admit that 'dust, mildew, and cluttered' certainly has it's charm.)  I bought The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys both by Michael Chabon because he's awesome.  I remembered the title and positive reviews of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner.  Perhaps that goes to show the value of a great title or maybe the benefit of being shortlisted for the Giller Prize.  Either way, the title stuck.

I bought six books in total this month, which is at least six too many considering what I still own and haven't read.

I read all of four books this month: this is a A LOT considering my recent reading fatigue.  I owe The Parrish Lantern and huge thank you for bring Full Blood by John Siddique and Warriors by David Lloyd to my attention.  The Tombs of Atuan by Ursual K Le Guin was perhaps the best and most boring book I've read this year.  Soon, I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman was phenomenal for more reasons than I can recall and launched a new name to my 'immediate read' list.    

December brings the holiday madness… blah…  Hopefully it will go over as well as Thanksgiving did.  In terms of reading, I'm currently in the middle of two books that I'm finding excellent: How To Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall and How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas Foster ; only one of those is non-fiction; color me surprised that I like it as much as I do.  For the rest of the month's reading I'm eyeing Thomas Lux's God Particles and, for some reasons, werewolves in London has a certain holiday appeal to me so I'll dive into Martin Millar's Curse of the Wolf Girl since I liked the first book so much.

Can anyone make sense of that last part?  Cause I can't…

In rereading this post, I see that my reading is all over the map!  And I honestly think that's a good thing.