What I’ve been reading this week.

I haven’t forgotten about this already, I swear. I was feeling under the weather this weekend, and didn’t have the energy to post. We’re back to our regularly unscheduled program now, or should be anyway.

Just to touch on briefly what I’ve been reading, here’s a weekly(ish) roundup! I’ll try and do this weekly, but we’ll see how things go. I have post ideas lined up, I just have to actually, y’know, do the thing about writing them.

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (pg. 343/1276)

I’m making good time through this book, despite it being so long and taking some time off the last few days to rest. It’s a surprisingly easy read for it being both a classic book and so long, but I suppose if it were boring and dense I wouldn’t be bothering with it. The plot lagged a little in the beginning while the author set the stage, but now that Dantes is well on his path of benevolence and revenge it’s moving fairly quickly. I’m super interested to see how he deals with the people who wronged him, as up until now he’s just been visiting kindness on his friends and benefactors. I also am very unfamiliar with the plot past this point, so I’m excited to fill in this huge book-shaped hole in my classics knowledge.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (pg. 146/607)

On the other side of the coin, I’m slowly making my way through this book. It’s a good book, but deep, and requires my two brain cells to do more than they’re accustomed to in order to really get meaning out of what I’m reading. Because I was sick I put this one on the back burner a little bit, but I’m eager to put some serious time into it. I’ll be up front and say that it isn’t grabbing me as much as other Murakami books have, but someone on my Instagram post (@eric.in.words) pointed out that it’s a book that you don’t realize you like it so much until you’re done with it. I pondered that for a minute and realized that that’s my feelings for a lot of his works. They aren’t in-the-moment grabbers, but books you think a lot about when you’re done. It was encouraging to hear, and I’m planning on enjoying the ride and assessing my feelings about it when I’m done.

And that’s really all I made progress on this week. I also have an audiobook on hold, but because I haven’t really gone anywhere (thanks COVID-19!) I haven’t really had an opportunity to finish it off.

Thanks to my cat Cleo for being such a patient book prop.

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Why We’re All Here.

Cleo, 2020. Smoosh.

Hi.

Welcome to my inaugural post, in which I explain why we’re all actually here. Or something.

I am a fickle person. I have ideas at random times of the day (and night), and feel compelled to act on them. So it was with this blog, which came to me as a 2:30am idea and would not let me sleep until I acted on it.

I’ve really wanted to connect with book people. I love my friends dearly, but none of them are book people, through no fault of theirs. We’ve just got different tastes, and isn’t it cool that we can be different and still friends? So it was within the last six months that I’ve struck out, trying to connect with other people who also love books. I joined a great Discord server (shout out to the Book Lover’s Club) and found many great book-y friends there! But I still felt like something was missing.

I tried streaming book-y things on Twitch for a couple months. I learned several things, namely that I’ll never be a professional audiobook narrator, and that the Just Chatting section of Twitch is just not the greatest place ever. I read all of A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island and part of Sherlock Holmes on Twitch before hanging it up. I still have a pirate hat and a distinct way of saying “bah, humbug!” to show for it.

So here we all are. I’m hoping to use this blog to post book reviews, to post book thoughts about things I’m reading, and to post other book-ish things. I work at a library, so also expect neat library images that I liked a lot from places I wish I worked at. I realize the book blog sphere is quite saturated, but I’m just wanting to do my own thing, for whatever good that does you and I.

Feel free to leave comments, I’ll try and engage where I can.