It's Monday, What Are You Reading? #26

I'm still plugging away at the same three books as I have been for the last three weeks:

This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley
The City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity by David Allen

Those are the three I'm picking up to read from a few paragraphs to a few pages daily as I've targeted them as high priority for various reason discussed previously. But I have been handling other books a lot as I move them around in the the reorganizing project. I flit among them like a butterfly. Hoping against hope that the dozen plus novels I've got out of the library will get their turn before they are due.

I may have done a little more than flit among the crochet books. I noticed yesterday that I am now actually reading some of the patterns without referring to charts or the stitch guides.

I'm still not feeling up to par and my eyes tire easily. The nasty bug dealt me a whopper of a whammy. And Sunday the sore throat came back with a fiery vengence along with that awful sinking weariness that is often the first sign of an oncoming virus. A relapse? A new one altogether?

Or just that I overdid having spent hours on Saturday sorting and reorganizing my desk and craft areas and the laundry and then on Sunday spent another two hours redoing some of it after my desk collapsed dumping my netbook into my lap and tumbled the contents of a box of crochet and sewing stuff onto the floor.

That interrupted my attempt to get ready to go to the Ashland library in order to access the internet as ours went down Saturday morning for some unknown reason. It has come back intermittently since Sunday morning but will not handle heavy duty like streaming or gaming and will go away again without warning. So we planned to go spend the afternoon at the Ashland library using their WIFI.

I was worn out before we left the house, having added a shower and shampoo to to the exertion of reassembling my desk. But after the brief rest in the car I was up for a short walk along Bear Creek to get the pictures I planned to use in my Sunday Serenity post. Then at the library I spent an hour browsing the shelves. Ashland has the second biggest of our fifteen library county system. Only Medford is bigger and all the rest are small branches. But the Ashland library being in the town of Southern Oregon University and the Shakespeare Festival and known as the liberal mecca of the Rogue Valley has more items in its collection that appeal to the academic, progressive, artist side of me. I simply love browsing their shelves. Especially their new book shelf which is ten times the size of the one at our Phoenix branch.

In spite of all the novels at risk of going back unread, I pulled Hunger's Brides by Paul Anderson off the shelf again. It is a 1300+ page novel which I started nearly two years ago while in Longview and have had checked out several times here. I think I made it past page 100 the first time but I'm having trouble identifying where I left off and of course I forgot to put the page number on the bib slip which is a habit I used to have but lost.

I also pulled the nearby volume of The Decameron off the shelf, a book nearly as fat. I checked it out too in spite of the fact that I'm sure I can find a free ecopy online as it is from the 1300s. But the book was so gorgeous. One of those book club editions that mimic the old leather with gold emboss and gold leafed page edges. The Decameron has popped up in other reading and video watching several times in the last months and I have never read it and in fact knew little about it before starting to peruse it while at the library and then checking it out on Wikepedia where I learned it has had major influence on the development of the novel form and is a commentary/musing on storytelling itself. It behooves me as both a reader and writer of fiction to be familiar with this classic.

I read several pages worth of it Sunday afternoon and several more after pulling it from the bag after midnight. But not in any order nor more than the a few sentences on the first page.

I'll discuss Sunday's library haul along with the upcoming Tuesday's on my Library Loot post Wednesday. I will try to have a picture of the Decameron by then. Will have to take it myself as it is unlikely I can find one online and would take me longer to look than to just take it myself.

Well I better wrap this up and tend to the laundry. The forth of five loads just beeped at me. We stopped at two stores after leaving Ashland Sunday afternoon so I took a four hour nap after returning home so that I could work on the laundry tonight. It has become so urgent that even feeling as subpar as I am I have little choice.