A reading and riding update

Today is my second century of the year. I kind of wish it were going to be rainy, so I could have an excuse to stay home and not ride, but, no, it's going to be a gorgeous day, so I'll be out riding for 6-7 hours. Once I'm out there it'll be fun, but sometimes it's hard to get myself up and out of the house at 6:30 in the morning to go ride all day. I'll certainly let you know how it goes!

As for books, I now have my copy of George Sand's Indiana, so I'm ready to read for the next Slaves of Golconda discussion. I think I'll pick up another novel before I begin Sand's, but that's just to make sure I don't read it so soon I forget it before the posts are due. I'm looking forward to it a lot.

But I don't feel like my reading is going that well these days. I'm much busier than I was a few weeks ago, so I have less time, and am only slowly dragging myself through books that I thought would go much faster. Dracula should be a fast read, but it's not when I only get through 20-30 pages a day. I'm on schedule with Proust, at about 50 pages a week, but my other books are languishing on the shelves. It's at this point that reading multiple books gets to be a bit more difficult, as I don't have time to read regularly in each one, and I begin to feel disconnected from them. Not that I'm going to give it up, mind you, but I do feel that if I can get to the end of one or two of my current reads, I might not pick up new ones, to get the total number down. It's just that I'm in the middle of a bunch of long books, so there's no end in sight: I'm maybe 1/3 of the way through my Colette biography, 1/4 of the way through Burney's letters and journals, and only 25 pages or so into Jane Kenyon's poems. And no where near the end of Proust.

I AM busy buying and mooching books though; my nice, neat to-be-read shelves are beginning to look a little less neat. In addition to Indiana, I've recently acquired The Great Mortality about the plague, and The Heptameron. I have The Places In Between, a travel book by Rory Stewart about walking through Afghanistan, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, and Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time on the way to me through Bookmooch. In times when I can't read much, buying (or mooching) books is a decent substitute.