My husband thinks I am becoming a hermit.
A hermit with long, well-conditioned hair, who eats coconut cream pie for lunch.
I average seven to eight books a month with no particular genre in sight. I get some books for free for review consideration and I stack them up with books I purchase with my money. I then arrange them according to the time frame I want them finished.
I sit on the couch directly across the shelf where I place the books and smile. Oh books.
Yes, I make a monthly reading list and I – more often than not – hit my target.
I just rounded my February reading list ending with Peter and Kelli Worrall’s 20 Things We’d Tell Our Twentysomething Selves (a review of which will be published in the Reading Ruffolos blog come February 28). I am currently resting my brain for another story (M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans was beyond good) that will blow my mind away. I am currently reading Natalie Grant’s A Dolphin Wish. I plan to ditch this teen novel though and resume with it in three days time. I am thinking about Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name, his retelling of The Merchant of Venice. I got my copy two days ago and I’ve been meaning to dig in and get lost in its pages.
Tomorrow, a Tuesday, I have my second session of my short stories class at the Flathead Valley Community College. Last Tuesday’s meeting has been fun and interactive. We read two one-page short stories including the Holy Bible’s Wedding at Cana and Melanie Rae Thon’s Blind Fish.
The exchange of insights and interpretations created an atmosphere of openness and I just felt I was being sucked in a vortex where the lives of the people I have read the past two weeks are swirling above my head. It’s crazy and fun and I’m happy.
It’s 11:35 p.m. on a Monday night. My oldest son, Nicholas is sleeping on the same couch where I am sitting right now. His twin sister, Antoinette, is sound asleep on her bed while Jeff Junior, our five-month-old heartbreaker, is whimpering inside his bassinet which is parked to the left of this couch.
I intend to read one chapter of Shylock and then perhaps watch one episode of the Gilmore Girls on Netflix. If sleep still evades me then I’m reading more short stories.
I know how this is going to end: me dreaming that I am a mermaid swimming in a desert with a glass of citrus-ginger tea in my hands and singing The Carpenters’ Top of the World.
Ha! The danger of reading too much!
