Is “Fiction Friday” too trite? Probably. Good thing I didn’t pick it. Plus, if I set up too many weekly features, I’ll have to come up with something everyday.
I have had a book-ridden week. Sadly, that left little time for reading. On Wednesday night, I went out with two women from my church to discuss the intricacies contained in The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. See my review here. Last night, I hosted my regular book club. The book was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. We had a very nice discussion over tea. It was a perfect beverage and book for a blustery day. Anyway, I was very pleased with the discussion. It made me realize that there is a lot of redeeming qualities to the book, even though some of the writing was atrocious. See my review here.
My reading horizon is now quite cluttered. I started reading Emma after the PBS Masterpiece Classics presentation on Sunday. Then I put Emma on pause to read The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett universally beloved among booklovers and bookbloggers. See blogs here and here and here. I will finish The Uncommon Reader today, hopefully on my lunch break. Then it’s probably back to Emma, unless I decide to hurriedly devour the next book club selection, The Whaleboat House (also known as Amagansett) by Mark Mills. I also checked out Cannery Row from the library, so I’m going to try and squeeze that in before I have to return it in two weeks.
I like having so much to look forward to.
In The Uncommon Reader, the Queen of England suddenly, and quite by accident, becomes a book addict. This has interesting consequences for both her personal and her public lives. I’ll do a full review this weekend after I finish the book, but I have been thinking a bit about the Queen’s reading methodology. She always reads with a notebook and pencil in hand, jotting down passages that catch her attention.
I haven’t ever really read while taking notes, unless it was a textbook and I was reading it for a class. I have thought for sometime now that it would be interesting to start a kind of book journal in which I record my contemporaneous reactions to books, jot down good (or bad) quotations, and thereby keep a log of my reading activities. This has also been a subject of interest on other blogs of late. See here and here and here. How do you people out there read and record?
Buy The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
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Glad you picked up Uncommon Reader! It’s such a fun book. And thanks for linking to my blog!