This week — and the week before — in reading
Uh. It looks like this weekly recap isn’t a consistent thing after all.
Books!
I finished three books since the last recap: number9dream by David Mitchell — man, I’m keeping an eye on David Mitchell; all of his books are in my to read list now — The Changeover by Margaret Mahy and The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I liked number9dream most, and now I definitely have to read Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as well. Reviews later! Probably very much later, the way I write those things.
New books checked out from the library this week are Possession by AS Byatt and East by Edith Pattou. I picked up Possession thanks to recommendations and also because it’s a Booker winner, and East because there’s a giant polar bear on the cover. Giant polar bear on the cover! After reading the inside flap, I realised that it was a retelling of the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The story is included in the anthology of Scandinavian folk tales I am reading which shares the same title with the folk tale. (Come to think of it, there’s a polar bear on the cover of that book too, and a girl is sitting on it.) I haven’t gotten to that particular story yet; the stories puzzle me a lot and I am taking an astonishingly long time getting through the book.
Other books in my “currently reading” pile: Tales of the Thousand and One Nights and Empire of the Sun. The progress on the latter is rather dismal — I’m still at chapter four. It’s not that I don’t want to read the book; it’s just that when I come across other books, I just drop it in favour of those new books. I can read Empire of the Sun quite contentedly when there are no other books around, like while I am eating lunch at work. Hmph. It’ll take forever to finish the book if this goes on.
I am also contemplating re-reading all of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time books. I must be mad. I am trying to convince myself that if I re-read them, I’ll feel like throttling Nyneave and Elayne ever so often as well as give Rand a clonk on the head, but somehow I am not discouraged yet. We’ll see where this will go. :P
Site updates
Some things have been tweaked and changed in this blog — mostly fonts and alignments (but only for Firefox 3.0) and I’ll have to look at the CSS again and fix a few things for IE one of these days. I keep thinking of redesigning the blog, but I can’t think of a nice enough layout and theme. Sad. I can code stuff, I’m just bad at the actual design stage. All tech skills and no sense for aesthetics. XD
I’ve also added a new page listing all the books I’ve read since 2007. I’m absurdly obsessive when it comes to lists. The current list sorts the books by authors’ last/family names, and I was contemplating a “by title” list but gave it up. The thes and as and ans confused the spreadsheet sort, and I’ll have to figure out whether having a separate field for the articles in front of the title is something I’d want to do before I try another sort. (And I wonder where the time goes. Hah.)
Other things
I kept thinking of participating in Weekly Geeks but I keep running out of time. I’m rather appalled at my progress with the previous “catching up on reviews” challenge issued some time back — I barely made any progress at all. It’s partly due to my insistence of posting reviews in the order of the books read — I told myself once that it was ok to skip books and come back later, but I found out that I couldn’t quite do that. Uh. Obsessive. That’s the word for today, I guess. You’d think someone who has such an obsession to have things posted in order would be able to keep her life in order, but somehow it doesn’t spill over to life outside of book blogs, this order-obsessed thing.
This week’s theme is about challenges, and I think I’ll use that to update my challenge posts. I don’t participate in many — don’t like a fixed reading list much would be the main reason, so the ones I participate in are often the ones that give a good amount of leeway in choosing what books to read. So hopefully there’ll be a post about challenges soon!
I was hoping that I’d be able to participate in the 24-hour Read-a-thon Dewey’s hosting, but I have a weekend trip to Pangkor Island with some friends from university . . . and their families. It’s a bit strange that there are only four of us singles joining in this time. I shall stay clear from babysitting duties; two-year-olds aren’t really my favourite sort of people, however cute they might be.
Anyway. Read-a-thon. Thanks to timezones, had I been able to participate, it would’ve started at midnight on Sunday for me — or possibly one in the morning on Sunday — I’m not quite sure what PST equals to: I thought it would be -8 UTC during daylight savings, but Dewey says it’s -7, so it’s very likely I am wrong. I’m at +8. Hmm. Never mind. I hope I’ll be able to participate next time when something like this comes up.
