Reading: More Than Words by John Warner
Also reading: Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts
Also, also reading: The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
Listening to: When We Were Wizards podcast
Watching: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (with the kiddos)
I am also in the midst of reading a lot more books but they’ve somewhat cycled out of the daily rotation, whereas the three listed above are the current “in-progress” reads.
My backburner books are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (a book I’m planning to teach this Fall semester), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see the Alice parenthetical), The House of Mirth (also a work book), and the Collected Fantasies Vol. 2 of Clark Ashton Smith (NOT a work book).
Sometimes I worry that I’m reading books for the sake of marking them off my list, reading as quickly and as relentlessly as I can. So far this summer I’ve finished twelve books. I enjoyed them all, but I can’t shake the nagging feeling that I didn’t absorb them as well as I could have.
I’m not sure of the remedy. I read so quickly because I have so many books I want to read. I try to “read at whim” as Alan Jacobs suggests, but sometimes that “whim” is dictated by what I need to read for work, or what feels like it could be useful for work. Or what the book club wants to read. Or what I feel I “need” to read because it’s been on the shelf for so long.
So maybe I don’t read at whim at all. Which might be why I feel that pressure. I am reading less at whim and more haphazardly, I guess. Whatever falls in my lap, whatever I need to read for work, whatever attracts me like a shiny object attracting a cat. And then the books I REALLY want to read (so I tell myself), end up going unread.
