As she does every year, Michelle at Seasons of Reading is hosting the High Summer Readathon beginning today and running for the next two weeks, culminating in a 48-hour Christmas in July readathon the last weekend of the overall readathon. Well, this sort of thing is completely irresistible to me, so of course I signed up.
High summer means different things to different people, I suppose. Where I live, it means the onslaught of near-100% humidity, mosquitoes, and hurricane season. Other places it means the weather is finally getting nice. Here's how Matthew Arnold put it (from the poem "Thyrsis"):
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow;
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening-star.
And here's even more summery Arnold goodness, from "The Scholar-Gipsy":
Here will I sit and wait,
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn—
All the live murmur of a summer's day.
When you've said that, you need say no more!
But enough of that -- what am I reading during this readathon?
- I will be finishing Sense and Sensibility for the Jane Austen Read-All-Along at James Reads Books;
- I will be finishing The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins for my Classics Club list;
- If I finish those two (which will be a feat), I'll use a random number generator to pick another title off my Classics Club list, since I am quite a bit behind on it.
- For the Christmas in July weekend, I plan to read:
- The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P.D. James (just four stories, so this should be entirely manageable)
- And something from my obscenely long TBR list on my Kindle: Christmas is Murder by C.S. Challinor
I'll keep you posted on my progress!
No comments:
Post a Comment