Books

I have been gulping down books as fast as I can, but through my ears.   I love holding books and turning their pages, but I can't do laundry while holding a book.  But when I listen to a book, it seems like I can do laundry twice as fast, and then go on to clean my whole house.  It was really great to have a book to listen to at night when Steve was out of town.  This might just be the solution to enjoying tax season.

While training for the half marathon, I listened to In Defense of Food and The Hunger Games.  While running the actual half marathon, I listened to Catching Fire.  When that was finished, I went onto Mockingjay, obviously.  I am so excited to see the movies.  I never got into the Twilight movies, but I think if there was a midnight showing of The Hunger Games, I might actually go.

I listened to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.   I really loved it.  It had just the right balance of lightness and meaningfulness.  Then My Antonia.  The writing and imagery were so achingly beautiful I thought I might cry.  Then I listened to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.   I had already seen the movie on Netflix, but as always, the book is better.  By the end of it, I wished my name was Margaret.  Not really.  Yes, really.


Next, I moved onto Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.   I finished it yesterday.  I have taken to saying "obviously" whenever I can because that's how much Oskar Schell means to me right now.  I don't know what to say about this book.  It was so good and so sad and so heartwarming too.  If you have issues with reading profanity, don't read this one.  I guess the one bad thing about listening to books is that hearing profanity sticks with me longer than if I had seen the word written on a page.  And, as good as the book was, I still don't like profanity.  There is one more downside to listening rather than reading.  Even though Oskar's name was audibly spelled out a couple of times, I still had to google his name in order to spell it correctly because I never saw it written, obviously.

Being in between books feels so sad.  I want to be in the last book, but it's never the same the second time around.  I'm hesitant to start a new one because there's that whole "warming up" phase.   Two from Galilee, Cutting for Stone, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are on my list.  Any other recommendations?