It's Monday, What Are You Reading? #28

This past week I said good-bye to a slew of library books spending some last minute quality time with them on their last days with me. A few I even held past their due dates. These were from the last of the large batches of books with their renewals used up. After that particular week around 9 weeks ago I began to slow down on checking out. Partly due to the flu but as much because it was so disheartening to be chasing due dates and feeling chased by them and so often eagerly awaiting a certain book's turn only to not have time to finish it once its turn arrived. So many novels have gone back with bookmarks somewhere between the end of chapter one and the end of the book in the last six or eight months! I do that intentionally with NF but I really hate when I'm in the middle of a novel when it comes due.

'Think on my Words': Exploring Shakespeare's Language by David Crystal was one that came due last Thursday which I held over the weekend to spend a bit more time with.

I also held back Lives Like Loaded Guns, the biography of Emily Dikenson and the audio book of 2666 by Robert Bolano.

Also, and this one might have hurt the worst as I'm still working to implement the system: Getting Things Done by David Allen--which surprised me by not renewing again when I expected it to.





Meanwhile, I'm neglecting the novel which I started last Monday two full weeks before it was due and am now going to feel the pressure as next Monday advances on me.

I discussed Take One Candle, Light a Room in both last Monday's and Friday's post so I won't reiterate all of that here. Suffice it to say, it is a stunningly written story at both the level of the language and the level of plot and character. I would like to be able to get lost in it but have been reading in snatches of paragraphs here and there between other tasks. Such as while waiting for something to download or something to heat up in the microwave.

Or I might pick it up as I'm preparing to lay down thinking I'll get a good twenty or thirty minutes but end up having to stop after one or two pages.

Now it is unlikely I'll have time to also read the other novel coming due next Monday and out of renewals: Dracula in Love which is the Dracula story told through the eyes of the young woman who is the object of the Count's affection and supposedly isn't all that grateful to the men who took it upon themselves to be her rescuers. An interesting take I was eager to explore.

Also out of renewals and due next Monday is The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America by Marisa Chappell. A NF so the pressure isn't too great. I just need to try to stop at a natural break.









Now this one is due on Sunday. A rare due date as our Phoenix branch is open only Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. But this is one of the books I checked out on that visit to the Ashland library two weeks ago when our internet connection was having problems and we went to use their WIFI.

Most of the other books I checked out there that day will renew for me but Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World's Religions Can Come Together by The Dalai Lama, was off the Hot of the Press shelf--books that can neither be held nor renewed.

I knew this and yet still have not managed to find time for it since the day after I brought it home feeling so pleased that I happened to catch it while it was on the shelf.