Random Reads

I always keep a list of books somewhere that I mean to read. In high school, I kept the list tacked to my wall. In college, I kept it in my journal. Now, I keep it on Goodreads.

But no matter where I store it, the list doesn't ever seem to grow any shorter. In fact, it only gets longer and longer and longer, and it develops a desultory stink about it. No matter how excited I am when I first type a new book into my list, the excitement never lasts. The longer the book sits on my list, the less I want to read it and the more it feels like a chore or an obligation. Right now, the most tenured book on my list is One Hundred Years of Solitude. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'd rather sift through my old trig textbook than crack the spine of Solitude.

However, there's something truly invigorating about choosing to read a book that I've never heard of before, a book that I know absolutely nothing about. I decided to snatch Barbara Vine's The Minotaur off the shelf at the KU library purely because it was a stranger to me.

Before I started The Minotaur, I'd never heard of Vine and I didn't realize that the book was a mystery. All I knew was that I loved the first sentence of the jacket blurb: "As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel." Awesome.

So far, I like it. I want to know what's wrong with John Cosway, and I want to know where Kerstin will find the labyrinth, and I want to know what's locked inside the library. Right now, that's good enough for me.

In the meantime, I'm doing a lot of walking, sweating, swimming, and editing, with a little baking thrown in (pictures are coming, I promise!). Mostly I'm just sweating, but that's July for you. More specifically, that's July in an apartment with a single window unit, weak fans, and a dryer constantly running outside the front door!  :P