This Week

I've been reading in bits and pieces this week - I've been listening to The Dog Stars (which has been much easier to become interested in through audio somehow...probably due to a good narrator making a topic more interesting than it would have been otherwise) and barely started Middlesex for a read-along at Unputdownables.  I'm also making my way through Sense and Sensibility.  It has been seven years since I've read S&S, and I'm getting so much more out of it this time.  What a good book.  Although I must say that the edition I'm reading is not exactly reading-in-bed-friendly.

That's me trying the sideways pose...the lying-on-my-back pose made me
look like I had alien thumbs.  (Thanks to my 9yo for help taking the photo!)

In other news, I'm apparently I'm an eclectic reader.  I didn't realize that my reading selections were oddly mixed until I saw this on GoodReads:

And...I discovered that knitting blankets—even baby sized blankets—is way more tedious than knitting sweaters.  But I did finish it in time to ship it over to Qatar, where my new nephew will be arriving in April. (Yay!)  After finishing this I immediately began two different sweaters to make up for it.  I have 3 more babies to knit for within the next few months, though, so I need to amp myself back up for knitting large rectangles.

Last, I'm thinking that maybe I'll give the Classics Club Spin another shot.  It was great motivation the first time, but completely ineffectual the second time.  And then I was so blog-absent that I didn't even realize they had a third and fourth time.  Now they're on Spin #5.  I really want to get some of my novellas read, so I've listed all those here, in addition to a few others to make up 20 books.

1. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
2. The Sufferings of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
4. Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather
5. The Enchanted Wanderer, Nikolai Leskov
6. The Duel, Alexander Kuprin
7. My Life, Anton Chekhov
8. *Freya of the Seven Isles, Joseph Conrad
9. *The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling
10. *The Distracted Preacher, Thomas Hardy
11. *The Lemoine Affair, Marcel Proust
12. *The Alienist, Machado De Assis
13. Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, Sholem Aleichem
14. The Duel, Anton Chekhov
15. *Fanfarlo, Charles Baudelaire
16. *May Day, F.Scott Fitzgerald
17. Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley
18. Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf
19. *The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, Italo Svevo
20. The Touchstone, Edith Wharton (edited to add: #20 it is!)

* These novellas are pretty tiny.  If one of these numbers is selected, I'll choose another to pair with it.  Two for the price of one!