Category: Updates

Updates

June 2012 Recap

Geoff W

I don’t have any pictures to start this recap, but there are plenty below (at the end).  June was a slow month on the reading front, but it was incredibly rewarding.  I started (and finished) Anna Karenina and thoroughly enjoyed it (even if it took 21 days to finish).  In addition I completed my re-read of Mansfield Park and read The Bird of Night, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Phantom of Pemberley.

Challenge Progress
I made major headway on my challenges as multiple books counted for multiple challenges.  Overall for the year I am 20/31 (65%) on challenges and this past month put me over the 50% level on EVERY 2012 challenge!

  • Mount TBR Reading Challenge
    • May Progress: 2 books
    • Overall Progress – 18/25 (72%)
  • Back to the Classics Challenge
    • May Progress: 2 book
    • Overall Progress – 5/9 (56%)
  • Tea and Books Reading Challenge
    • May Progress: 1 books
    • Overall Progress – 7/8 (89%)
  • The Classics Club
    • May Progress: 3 books
    • Overall Progress – 9/100 (9%)

Random Awesomeness
It was  an interesting month for finding random stuff about books online. I’ve pulled out the three I found to be most exciting/interesting and they are below.

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Updates

Lunch Break Interlude VI

Geoff W

So apparently this is turning into a regularly occurring post – which is great, but who knows if it’ll last 😀   I’m making my way through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I didn’t know if I would like it this much, but geez it is a LONG book.  I’m just over half way through (pg. 604) and will have to take a break when I get to Part 5 (in about 40 pages) to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for my Books into Film book group next Monday.

So you know how I’ve been on a book ban for June – well it’s going decently well.  I ‘accidentally’ (not really, but I’m sticking to that story) bought A Weekend with Mr. Darcy by    Victoria Connelly for $2.99 for a fun light summer read later this summer (it reminded me a lot of What Would Jane Austen Do?). But the best part is, coming home from the gym Saturday morning (GO ME!) there were two boxes of free books at the end of the street and I of course went through them 😀 I picked up a copy of A.S. Byatt’s Still Life and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (this makes me nervous) for me and there was a copy of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha I picked up for Tom (and I’ll probably re-read).

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Updates

Lunch Break Interlude V

Geoff W

As I said in the last one, it never fails when you do an update or a recap something else comes along that is pretty cool and you have to share – such as the book to the right.

Now I am in a book buying ban, but I am not in a book ban 😀  When I went to get my haircut this past weekend there was a woman handing copies of Justin Cronin’s The Passage.  I assumed it was for World Book Night (a few days/weeks late), but when I asked she had no idea what I was talking about. She said these were giveaways to spread word about the next book in the series/trilogy released this coming October. I don’t know if this has been common in the past, but it feels like this might be where the book industry is heading. With the mass production of books and the rise of ebooks who knows.  It reminded me a little of Scholastic’s giving 525 copies of the Hunger Games trilogy to my work for our gala.  But hey, I’m not going to knock it – it did add another book to my to-be-read pile/list, but it didn’t cost me anything!

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Updates

May 2012 Recap

Geoff W

Sometimes you just have to hate WordPress. I had an entire post written and apparently the autosave didn’t work so when Firefox crashed I lost it. UGH. This will be a ‘snippy’ post because I’m now grumpy that WordPress didn’t save my stuff and Firefox crashed.

Memorial Day weekend Tom and I drove up to Maine.  We stayed with his parents and just relaxed.  I didn’t read as much as I wanted to, but I did start (and have since finished) Mansfield Park.  the photo to the right is from our last night out by the lake (yes we were making smores), which was spent having a cookout and playing horseshoes (which I’m not great at but did score a few points). It was a lovely weekend and was a much-needed breather from the city.

Book Buying Ban
So I’m going on a book buying ban. I did really well the first part of the year, but in March and April I went a little crazy and ended up with 10-15 (maybe more) new books added to my TBR shelf.  So Friday night I decided to go through my shelf to find out how many books are on there and there are 75 book waiting to be read, and this doesn’t even include all of those on my Kindle!  Now that’s not a lot of books compared to some people’s lists I’ve seen, but that’s too many for me!  I don’t really have the space to have those books just lying around and I don’t think they should just sit there.  So no new books for me for a while at least (I’m taking it a month at a time).  Hopefully I can make a dent on the shelf – but not all this year.

Challenge Progress

  • Mount TBR Reading Challenge
    • May Progress: 2 books
    • Overall Progress – 16/25 (64%)
  • Back to the Classics Challenge
    • May Progress: 1 book
    • Overall Progress – 3/9 (33%)
  • Tea and Books Reading Challenge
    • May Progress: 0 books
    • Overall Progress – 6/8 (75%)
  • The Classics Club
    • May Progress: 3 books
    • Overall Progress – 6/85 (7%) 6/100 (6%)

That’s about it for the month of May.  I started to read The Bird of Night by Susan Hill this weekend after finishing Mansfield Park (which is technically June but eh).  I also used random.org (only the 2nd time I’ve used it) to pick my next challenge read and it selected Anna Karenina which is part of all three of my 2012 Challenges and The Classics Club.

Updates

Lunch Break Interlude IV

Geoff W

Lucky you, fellow bloggers, two Lunch Break Interlude posts within a two-week span!  The writing bug has clearly infested my brain, as by the time this posts I will have pre-scheduled three weeks of consecutive posts, dating all the way back to my first piece about Anne Brontë!

Mother’s Day weekend I went over to Harvard to get my haircut and once again couldn’t escape the lure of Harvard Bookstore. I stopped in afterward and got these two lovely books! Annabel by Kathleen Winter is on my long to-be-read list from when I saw it in Harvard Book Store over a year ago and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker is a Man-Booker Prize winning novel and I’m slowly working my way through all those winners as well. The only downside was that The Ghost Road is the third book in a trilogy and the other two books in the trilogy, even though they were used, were more expensive so I didn’t grab them, but that means I’ll be supporting my local library!

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