Bus Book, Bed Book, Book Club

Sometime back in the spring I decided that I no longer read enough. I also decided that I was wasting my time on public transit with the Red Eye and gave it up for Lent to be replaced by real books. Resolved, I made my way over to the wonderful Harold Washington Library, picked up the Interpreter of Maladies and started a book reading frenzy. Since then, I've rarely been without at least two books checked out - a bed book and a bus book. One for home and one for my hour and a half of daily commute.

About the same time, a friend urned me to the website Goodreads, where I've been keeping track of and reviewing everything I read. Being one of those people who takes joy in lists, it's right up my alley. I'm a little behind on my reviews right now, but I highly recommend the site.

East of Eden

The bus book (currently East of Eden) is largely determined by weight. If it's too heavy it stays home. Books in fragile condition also miss the cut, but mostly, whichever book I want to get through first is the bus book - since it gets solid dedicated time 5 days a week.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

The bed book (currently Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) usually takes me twice as long to get through as the bus book. Except for the Harry Potters I've been stealing from my now husband, which take two days. I also try to to mix it up so I'm reading one fiction and one non-fiction, or at least two different styles. I'm becoming increasingly interesting in pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing, so I'm self-educating in way.

Lastly, one of the books is now a book club. A few weeks before I left for the wedding, my friend Kasey and I met up at an ridiculously cute and francophiliac cafe, The Bourgeois Pig , prior to catching a comped performance of "An Intimate Evening with Lynda Carter." Just as we were about to leave, a small group of twenty-somethings started gathering for a book club. Kasey and I both looked at them wistfully and decided that we too should have a book club and meet in this charming locale to discuss.

Well, she was reading East of Eden and I had just brought my copy back from California, so it seemed a logical first choice - any Oprah book club connections aside. (Speaking of which, half the time her "selections" just seem like things I was required to read in high school -- Night, East of Eden, Anna Karenina, Sound and the Fury -- really? I'm so glad you discovered these for me Oprah, I never would have heard of them without you. )

Anyway, Kasey and I are both about halfway through the book now, so if anyone is a speedy reader, they're welcome to join in. I'm guessing we'll meet up mid-to-late November. After which, I hope this gets to be a reoccurring thing.

Speaking of Kasey, tonight was the second annual "William Shatner" apple pie baking fest -- this time with furniture! Photos and tasty pie recipe to come soon.

Print Friendly and PDF Follow
follow us in feedly
http://www.mscleaver.com/chronicles/2007/10/21/bus-book-bed-book-book-club
www.mscleaver.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-39
64382
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GLQYZS7WGSRIVZRNB4FQP362VCWJKEY2
<urn:uuid:61ebf9c3-977a-4901-9922-f465a19dcbb5>
2018-09-19T00:02:15Z
104.28.2.57
text/html
sha1:DPR52NCGOQPDDCX6PIANXF5ANVTXGTLA
<urn:uuid:0a547bbe-afd3-43a9-87cc-0346073e5957>
http://www.mscleaver.com/chronicles/2007/10/21/bus-book-bed-book-book-club
response
<urn:uuid:88307105-5c07-4f58-9bd5-c56660af1949>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-113-176-82.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/