Last year was one of my slowest reading years for quite a while. I’m not surprised, given the frenetic pace, but it’s something I’m fixing this year, not least because my brain is threatening to melt and I really just need the recharge time.
So, this school holidays, I decided to do a mini challenge and attempt 7 books in the two weeks of the holidays. I usually average a book a week throughout the year, peaking in holiday periods, so it’s not a massive stretch but on the other hand it’s enough that I needed to concentrate to make sure it happened. (I read about 60-100 pages per hour, depending on the density of the text. 90-100 pages for fiction or narrative non-fiction, usually.)
And then, last week, we went away, and on the first full day my laptop battery died, and I couldn’t find the charger (assumed I must have accidentally left it at home, but then PLOT TWIST it turned out I’d taken it after all and just hadn’t found it). That really facilitated reading, let me tell you :’D
So, thus far, I’ve read:
Ayesha At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin. Really enjoyed this, partly because I am super invested in just two fandoms in life, one of which is Harry Potter, and the other of which is Pride & Prejudice. Ayesha At Last is a contemporary muslim P&P, so that was a major selling point for me right there. Additionally, it was kind of refreshing to read about people whose faith forms an integral part of their everyday lives. I enjoyed that.
Second up was my apparently-annual re-read of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Love this book so much. Refreshing and inspiring, she’s totally living the life I want to live and I’m inspired to take a step closer to it every time I read this book. Additionally, food culture is a major interest of mine, and the more research I do, the more I’m convinced that a significant return to local economies has the potential to provide a workable solution to a lot of the world’s major problems.
Next was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I went in with low to moderate expectations because a friend of mine had read it and was pretty ‘meh’ about it, but a student gave it to me as a farewell present a few years ago and the time seemed right. A pleasant surprise – I really enjoyed it! Yeah, okay, the bones of the plot is utterly predictable and largely wish-fulfillmenty, and the love interest is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, but no book is perfect and there was some nice contemporary sensitivity to issues of race and gender and weight in the context of gaming that I appreciated, and overall I just found the worldbuilding really immersive and engaging. It was a fun, satisfying read in an original and engaging setting and I had a blast 🙂
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was the first ‘serious’ entry on my list. For an English teacher, my education in the classics is honestly a little lacking :’D so this yearI’m trying to include more of them in my everyday reading. I started Gatsby before Ready Player One and was honestly super into it. Finishing it after RPO meant I probably didn’t appreciate it quite as much as I might have, but I *did* still enjoy it, so you know.
Final one on my list so far is True Feelings by Carolyn Mahaney, which is a religious take on the idea of emotions. I actually came away from this with some great ideas/perspective – I loved most the emphasis on the idea of balancing sorrow (for the state of the world) with joy (for small blessings in life, etc), and the fact that whenever one is out of balance, we’re either drowned by the sorrow or else made callous by naive joy. The practical solution of working to keep both halves of our emotional selves in balance really resonated with me – especially since reading more this year is one way I’m working to try to overcome the Weltschmerz (world sorrow) that seems to characterise modern western life these days.
So there you go: 5 books in 8 days; I’m about a quarter of the way through my next (long!) read, so am on track to finish 7 in the two weeks. Hurrah! 🙂
What have you been reading lately that you’ve enjoyed? <3