July was a crazy busy month, but I was somehow able to read/post EIGHT books.  I actually read Tropic of Cancer and Slammerkin in July, but didn’t have computer access this past weekend so those posts were the first two of August. I’m reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and it’s interesting to say the least.
On Goodreads yesterday I found this AWESOME stat (above) where it tells you the number of pages (or books, or the year of the books in a graph format) of the books you’ve read that year. My current tally sits at 10, 775 pages. Given books vary in the editions you read it could easily be off, but it’s still pretty neat.If you’re not on Goodreads, Join! And FRIEND ME!
I’m also very excited as over the weekend the Boston Book Festival announced the author lineup for the 2011 festival. I’m probably most excited for Alison Bechdel (Heck yeah Fun Home), Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize winning novelist of The English Patient, and Carlos Eire author of Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. October 15, 2011 can’t get here soon enough!
On a personal note, I work for on one of the Harbor Islands, and this month is a busy month, as are the next few! We’ve had graduations off and on over the past few weeks, a family event this coming weekend, a 4k trail run next month, a reception in October and a lot of correspondence going out by the end of the calendar year. But one of the perks of the job, is the fact that I work for an island and occasionally have the opportunity to get out of the office and work from/on the island.
Today I was out on the island for a graduation ceremony and ended up waiting for a later ferry, and got to sit on the dock in the sun and read for a half hour (left, you can almost see the city in the upper left hand corner) in the lovely Adirondack chairs (right). 
So even though sometimes I feel like I’ll never catch up on work, or that I can’t quite complete a project to the perfection I want, the opportunity to visit the island and to interact with the countless students we serve and the donors who visit the island, and something as simple as getting to read for 30 minutes on the dock truly makes it all worth while.