Friday, April 24, 2009

Too Many Books!

Hi invisible readers,

Ordinarily I am the kind of person who likes to multi-task. I like to clean the entire house at the same time by walking from room to room and back again, instead of tackling it one room at a time. If I start in the living room and see books that should be in the bedroom, I'll transport the offending articles and find something that needs to be done in the bedroom while I'm there--making the bed for example. Then when I pick up the comforter and find clothes that should be in the hamper in Amy's room, I'll make the bed and then take the clothes to Amy's room and look for a new challenge there, all the while reminding myself that if I can find a way to usefully get back into the living room (putting away the mug from last night's snack, for example), the entertainment center needs to be dusted. It is a weird game I play that makes cleaning the house more exciting.


Anyway, there is one area in which I do not like to multi-task: reading books. I like to be in the middle of only one book at a time. Lately, however, I have started several books, and it is very strange to be reading them all simultaneously. It makes it difficult to get completely lost in the imaginary world of a book when one is constantly reminded (by reading other books) that there are tons of other imaginary worlds out there and none of them are real. The culprits that have caused my current disbelief in all fiction are: the second book in the Fablehaven series (which is difficult to believe in anyway due to various inconsistencies in that fantasy world), The Face of a Stranger (a detective novel I have not yet been able to finish, perhaps because of the very, very long chapters), The Call of the Wild (a children's novel that has thinking dogs and such like the Disney movie Balto--I generally like books about people), and finally, Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara (started with a bang and now the group--Flick, Menion, and Shea--are traveling and things have slowed WAY down, reminiscent of the second book of Tolkien's famous trilogy).

As both an experiment in the art of adding pictures to my blog and as proof that I have not done my multi-tasking-style cleaning in quite some time, here are pictures of each of those books where they can be found at this very moment.

Fablehaven:


The Face of a Stranger:


The Call of the Wild:


The Sword of Shannara:


Being in the middle of all of these very different books is causing my imagination to reject them all. In the future I will return to my "one book at a time" policy, but at the moment I feel as if I need some kind of debt consolidation program for readaholics (spend all of your reading hours on the shortest book, then move to the next shortest, and so on until all books have been completed). :) Anyway, I suppose my life could be worse. At least I actually have time to read these days!

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