There’s more to my blog than meets the eye. My eyes are always busy. Today I will raise my eyes from my leg and my problems and consider some of the books that I’ve been reading and will be reading this month and following. I usually read two or three books at a time, not simultaneously, of course, but at different times of the day and in different venues.
These days, at breakfast, I am reading Among the Giants, about the first major archeological investigators who explored Easter Island and the behemoth statues on it. Easter Island has been on my bucket list for eons, (well, half a century) and I am finally going to see it in April. So I must know more before I leave. The book is a gift from the lovely woman I will be sharing a cabin with, a new friend met on the World number; it’s well written and exhaustively researched by Jo Anne Van Tilburg. I’m on page 111 (of 233 pages) and only now approaching Easter Island.
For months, off and on, I have been reading the collection of books that comprise The Outlander - on my IPad electronic reader. I actually downloaded it before I went on my “World Trip” but I was too busy sightseeing, eating, drinking, making friends, playing Trivial Pursuit and working on my next project (the screenplay which is just now coming to fruition (i.e. the first draft). It has been a welcome respite for my low ebb of the day on the recliner in my study area mid-afternoon.
At night on the sofa and with TV on for the company of a human voice I have been going over and over the book that my screenplay is based on, plus other peripheral reading to fill in details I need to give voices to the characters involved.
I used to pedal in the late afternoon (on a seated stationary bicycle, no hands required so I can hold a book) but I can’t for a while because of my leg, so the mysteries or other light reading I do while I pedal has to wait. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished collection, Bogambo Snuff Box, but it will have to wait.
New books have come in over Christmas and more to come with my birthday, one very special, a gift from a new friend I met on the theatre tour: The Year of Lear by James Shapiro. I’m looking forward to it. The new ones wait on a small bookcase in the hall until I pick them up and read them. Then I either lend them or give them to friends or to the in-house volunteer library in my building, or keep them. That;s why I need more bookcases.
It’s never-ending, isn’t it? And there is never enough time. I used to think that by the timeI was 80 I’d have enough time to relax and read books that I missed, that fell by the wayside, but I’m still too busy. Well, maybe when I’m 90?