Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Reading

New rules:
  1. No more buying books and not reading the ones you already have.
  2. No more starting books and not finishing them-- unless they're so boring they make my eyeballs pop-out!
I finally finished the Hodgman book, The Areas of My Expertise. John Hodgman is a very funny man, I just didn't know if I could take 250 pages of him.

This month, I also read my first Stephen King novel. I'd never read any of his works before, although, I've seen tons of his movies. I thought I'd start off with an epic, his book, Needful Things, and I loved every page of it (all 731, making it the longest book I've ever read). OK, so I was an English major-- I should be high-brow about my literature, right? Nah, don't think so.

Yesterday afternoon I tried to start Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Although it's story is somewhat outweighed by its (and Ms. Rand's) impact in the world of objectivism and philosophy, I thought I'd give it a go. Or not: I had just come off of a 700-pager, I didn't quite think I was up to read another. So, I thought of this little man:

hobbit

Yes, indeed that's Mr. Bilbo Baggins! I remember watching the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit when I was a kid. So why not read the book? So, yes, I've started reading The Hobbit and I'm very much enjoying Mr. Tolkien's sing-songy style of writing. And yes, I'm ready for an adventure.

(My brothers should regain some faith in me-- I was disowned after admitting I'd never read Tolkien or ANY of the Harry Potter books.)

2 comments:

Alex said...

Rule #2 is dangerous. I got stuck for a long time on The Brothers Karamazov because of this rule, and my reading of other books screeched to a halt. Gravity's Rainbow has done this to me too. Beware!

SimoneladybugKnits said...

I have that same habit of buying books when I haven't finished reading other books. I also read 2 books at the same time, when one is sorta slow I start reading the other one and then vice versa.