By I took a little time to revisit my blog posts from the last ten weeks, and after tallying can say I did in fact read 10 books in 10 weeks. Yahoo!
I wasn’t sure since there were several I picked up and put down since we began ten weeks ago. I even read an 11th book while house sitting in Sacramento for fellow reader K8 — the first volume of Transmetropolitan. It was a re-read for me, but a great way to spend a few hours on a late summer afternoon.
I enjoyed the flexibility I gave myself this go-around. Starting without a list sometimes left me scrambling to finish a book each week, which sometimes meant grabbing something shorter or more visual, but there should be room for such reads, too. I don’t like the notion of something “not counting” because it’s not long enough, or complex enough, or whatever other hurdle I’m supposed to cross– this realization is very freeing. It meant reading Marianne Moore over the course of a Sunday in a forest of sequoias, and spending time with Valley Fever after settling back in to the Central Valley Bloch’s poetics surround.
And yet I did finish The Golden Notebook, which was an important goal for myself– a challenging and dense, complex novel but certainly worth the time investment. I enjoy wrestling with long novels– it works a totally different part of my brain, but it takes a good one to keep me moving through it. TGN took about 200 pages before I felt like I “wanted” to read it.
I was surprised at some of the discoveries I made– not having a list or a stack gave me freedom to pull from little free libraries on lawns while traveling, which brought me the wonderful book written by a collection of children’s illustrators.
Overall, I must say that after doing this a few times around, I think I’m getting the hang of it. It is a total joy to read all of the other posts here to sustain my reading, but also to learn and explore with everyone here. I have a never-ending book queue that grows with every session! I love our diversity of reading and the freedom we all embrace here.
Thanks again for another great summer of reading together!
A
Open Arts Spring 2023 
Good stuff, Borkali. Thank you ever so much for organizing these reading challenges! I thought for funsies I’d look at my reading list on the library website to see the audio books I listened to during the challenge & list them here, just in case any of them piques a fellow-reader’s interest:
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (LONG sci-fi book. The best thing was when I heard this: “Part III – Five Thousand Years Later”)
The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan (Wins for longest title. Interesting to find out that the name Vanderbilt started out as Van der Bilt, as in Van from the city of Bilt.)
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier (Fiction created around the poet William Blake, a minor-ish character in the story.)
All for now…a wonderful autumn season to all!
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