Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Winter's Respite Read-a-Thon: Day 2


Tuesday, Jan. 22
# of pages read: 86
Books read: 
Julia Child's My Life in France
Northanger Abbey
Versailles: Biography of a Palace
October Sky
Books finished: 1
Total # of pages read: 178

11:04 am: No reading yet; I've spent my morning doing P90X (first time ever! It's hard!) and interviewing for a job! Since then I've been catching up on reading blogs. Just wanted to check in and let you know that I am finally going to pick up a book now. I think I'll join Julia Child in France and see if I can't finish that book in the next couple hours. :) Happy reading!

2:16 pm: Finished My Life in France and it was lovely! The book felt like a conversation with Julia, just her recalling her experiences in France, writing a cookbook, appearing on television...it was all so much fun, and I have to say, I'll miss that book a little bit.

After finishing the last 50 or so pages of that, I read a couple more chapters of Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen is really so wonderfully clever in this novel. The last book I read by her was Persuasion, which was great but a little gloomy, so it's really fun to get back to the really biting, Emma-type prose that makes Austen so fantastic.

My favorite part of that reading was at the end of chapter 5, when Austen goes on a little rant about novels and how they don't get the credit they deserve. So much fun to hear her voice come through so strongly!

"'And what are you reading, Miss--?' 'Oh! It is only a novel!' replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ...In short, it is only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language." 

Hah! And that's only part of a great, long paragraph about how under-rated the novel was. I wouldn't have wanted to be the poor fool who disagreed with her!

I'm thoroughly enjoying the read-a-thon, but I'm realizing that this may actually be the busiest week I've had since I've been married. Ha, ha! Well, maybe a read-a-thon is exactly what I need to keep me from getting lazy about my reading! 

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