Readathon Wrapup

By -
It's not even 8pm here, but I'm wrapping up my readathon because it's finally cold and dry enough outside to do some chocolate tonight.  My chocolate is melting in the oven now, and I'm going to do truffles!  I love truffles.  I've been thwarted in the last couple of days by incessant rain, which is good for everything except dipping chocolate.

Although I couldn't sit around all weekend and do nothing but read, I am pretty happy with what I got to do.


I made really good progress in The Good Soldier Svejk, enough that I got tired of it and didn't read any today.

I read 4 chapters of Return of the Native.

Probably around 4 chapters of Quo Vadis too.

I started a book!  I just got Peter Kreeft's book You Can Understand the Bible.  It's meant to facilitate Biblical literacy and help people get familiar with the Bible.  I am already pretty familiar with the Bible, but I'm really enjoying his thoughts and the slightly different perspective (since he's Catholic, and I'm not).

I also read A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.  I was looking at the Christmas bookshelf and realized that I have never read one of the most famous Christmas memoirs there is.  So I read it.

I finished Geraldus Cambrensis' The History and Topography of Ireland, which is a lovely little book that I chose to finish off my medieval lit challenge.  I was about 2/3 of the way through.

I read all of Book VI of the Histories!

And I finished my gym book, Operation Mincemeat, about a secret operation in WWII.



Now I've got a pile of things to write up in proper posts.  But not tonight.


Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 2, 2012 at 9:24 PM

    Good Job! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Quelle BooksDecember 3, 2012 at 8:19 AM

    Congrats on the readathon! I have been meaning to do one myself but am not sure which one to do.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanDecember 4, 2012 at 1:37 PM

    Just pick one, Raquel! :) Though I'd pick a short one first. Some of them are a week long.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more