Last month, I mentioned wanting to bump up my relaxation reading, and my Scribd subscription helped with that in October. For my reading the Odysseys project, I started Stephen Mitchell’s translation (it will be in my November review). I also focused on contextualizing by familiarizing myself with Homer scholarship and reading more reception literature. Continue reading “Enraged and more October reads”
We’ve arrived at the halfway point of 2016, and for me, that means the halfway point of my commitment to read my own books this year.
When I’ve done reading challenges before, they’ve been numbers based, along the lines of “I promise to read 100 books this year.” The numbers game hasn’t led to much reflection for me. Mostly, it’s led to anxiety about keeping up. #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks is the first yearlong challenge that has pushed me to think about my reading habits and patterns as well as what I want for myself as a reader and what is realistic for me as a person. I’ve reflected on these before, of course, but not in the context of an explicit challenge. In the process, I’ve learned quite a few lessons about reading, and myself. Continue reading “Reckoning with #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks in June”
Doomsday prophesies aren’t just a bookish pet peeve. As a general rule, I’m frustrated by fear mongering – promoting the idea that we’re traveling down a slippery slope of ultimate human suffering and destruction from which we can never recover. *Cue ominous music*
Suffering and destruction are realities of human existence. No doubt about that. But humans are also extraordinarily resilient creatures. We’ve survived centuries, millennia, of wars, plague, and life before the Internet. Lingering in anger and resentment, obsessing about the past and what we want but can’t have – these hold us back and prevent us from dealing with reality as it is, like it or not. Continue reading “Reading Pet Peeve #3: Doomsday Prophesies”
Picture me scratching my head and trying to figure out where the heck March went. April? Already?
But I digress. I had a solid reading month, and eclectic! A time travel novel, two memoirs in verse, two audiobooks, four of my own damn books, and the fewest book buys of any month this year! And here we go… Continue reading “The unabridged list of what I read in March”
My journey to embrace audiobooks has been a rousing success so far this year. Granted, we’re not quite three months in, but I’m hopeful.
I’ve been thinking about the degree to which this may be a case of necessity being the mother of invention: My committed desire to really, really find an audiobook I could stick with created the favorable conditions for that to happen. Continue reading “Do some books make better listens than reads?”
