Delirity

To celebrate the release of Android Karenina, Quirk Classics is sponsoring a contest. Click here and mention my blog to be entered to win 1 of 25 Quirk Prize packs which has a whole bunch of awesome stuff in it, including several of their books!

I have to admit that I’m sort of in love with Quirk Classics. It’s brilliant – take a classic novel and modify it in a way that causes a resurgence of interest. I’m all for anything that encourages reading!

Somehow I’ve never managed to read Anna Karenina. Android Karenina actually got me fairly excited because I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to read a “revised” version of the story without having knowledge of the original (I had read Pride and Prejudice many times before embarking on the Zombiefied version).

I’m really loving the book. There’s the romance aspect that is requisite for all (or at least most) classics, though it explores different types of romances including adulterous relationships. There is definitely quite a bit of social commentary which is particularly interesting since I don’t have much background in Russian history. And then there’s the technology.

The technology throughout the book is really fun and inventive – a dance turns into a “float” where couples dance on puffs of air, going abroad means getting sent into outer space, and everyone in the highest social class receives their own humanoid robot upon coming of age.

I have to laugh at how appropriate this technology is given my own current work. I was just at a conference for work (International Society for Gerontechnology in Vancouver, BC) and one of the most entertaining things we saw was a humanoid robot that’s currently being used for all sorts of research. I’d love to have my own robot that would help me out throughout the day!

I’m starting early on planning some really useful goals for next year. One is going to keep me on the straight and narrow of reading books that will keep me growing as a person. I’ve got a bunch of great recommendations courtesy of Dave Ramsey, but I’d love to hear what other non-fiction books people have been enjoying and think might be of benefit to read!

I’m thinking I’d like to have a list of things ready that I’d like to read, and then I’ll pick one per month. That should still leave me plenty of time for all my fiction reading. This year I’ve been reading along with the Sound Mind, Sound Mom book club where Tsh picked out some really great books for the year. It’s been good, though quite frequently I read the books too far in advance or I get behind because I get busy reading other things (for the book club you usually read only a chapter or two per week – and I just don’t read that way!).

After not reading much in May (I listened to 4 audio books, but barely made it through 100 pages of any paper books), I did a fair amount of reading in June. I finished up listening to all the Sookie Stackhouse novels. I read a couple of Dave Ramsey books. I finally finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which was a really interesting read).

I’m currently about 1/3 of the way through Last Child in the Woods which
is really enlightening. It’s about how children need to be out in nature, but how the opportunities for that are declining for various reasons. One thing that’s very cool to me about the book is that the author references a lot of people and places in San Diego (though he certainly mentions others as well). He has yet to talk about my favorite natural areas from growing up, but I like being able to at least somewhat visualize the areas being talked about.

I also have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies waiting on my to read bookshelf (I finally just bought it a few weeks ago). And of course, to complicate matters completely, 4 of the books I’ve had on hold at the library came in today (and there was one I started to read last week that had to go back before I even got to chapter 1!). I guess now that my eyes are healing up nicely, the only real solution is to make sure I’m spending some time reading every day (other than just listening to audio books in my car – currently listening to Artemis Fowl).

I love reading, but somehow it feels like there are just soooo many books and so many other things I need to be doing!

I enjoy reading. I don’t enjoy paying $16 for a paperback book that I’m going to read once… even when I get a giftcard to a regular bookstore I tend to wait until I have a coupon so I can get more book for my money. I know that sometimes books take me a long time to read if I get wrapped up in other projects, so I’m not quite as into borrowing from the library as I probably should be.

My solution to this dilemma used to be Half.com. I still use that route sometimes, but it requires quite a bit of planning (you have to keep your next read on hand since it can take a while) and sometimes the book you want still isn’t that cheap. Since moving to the northwest I’ve discovered something amazing… Goodwill stores sell books for $2-4. It’s incredible. Of course, they won’t always have the book you’re looking for (though I have found some amazing finds there!)… Enter Powell’s. Usually I’m completely daunted by the store since it’s so enormous and the parking situation is a little scary sometimes. But I’m willing to brave the store when I’ve got a gift card or need to pick up something that’s a little harder to find.

Yesterday, between Goodwill and Powell’s (where I had a $25 gift card) I bought 4 books (Whiteout by Ken Follett, The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory, The Many Lives and Sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gulland, and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova) for a grand total of $2.93 of my money. Such a deal! And now I should be set for reading for another month or two. But I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out at the area Goodwills for other books to stick in the queue!

As far as what I do with books once I’ve read them – well, I’m still trying to find a good solution. Quite a few I hang on to, though I usually don’t reread my books. For a while I was ‘releasing’ my books into the wild with bookcrossing, but since no one ever reported finding my books it makes me worry that they never got read. Now I’m thinking maybe I should join an online bookswap community like BookMooch. If anyone has ever participated in one of those, let me know – I’m a little nervous to join since I know almost nothing about it.

I’ve never been the kind of person to read multiple books at once (unless it was something for school). I prefer to focus on one book at a time, then move on to the next. But, since I started listening to audiobooks in my car I’ve been amazed that my brain is actually able to deal with me reading one book at home while listening to another in the car. Usually I get plots confused… and it still happens if the books are too similar, but apparently if they’re different enough it isn’t a problem!

Right now I’m listening to The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. It’s about a historian on the hunt for the history and real Dracula (who he believes is alive) while he searches for his thesis advisor who has gone missing, told from the perspective of his daughter who learns of this story and begins the hunt herself. If you have any interest in Dracula and the myths and history surrounding hom, it is a fabulous book. The unabridged audio is 26 hours and I’m about halfway through right now. The book is 600-some pages, but it’s totally worth it… I promise.