Ten Days to Go!

I find it difficult to believe that it is only ten more days and I will have been blogging here for a full year. I'm shaking my head, trying to remember back to last May when I started this blog.

I'm going to spend the last ten days ruminating, if you will. And then, on my birthday, I will drop down to just a weekly post here, a roundup with pictures and captions.

When I started out, I had an ambitious agenda for reading 60 books during the course of the year. I think I will end up at that point in terms of the amount of reading I've done this year but as far as individual titles, I'll be in the 40s somewhere.

I find that paying attention to where I spend my reading time has pushed me to clear my shelves of books that, really, I'll never pick up, volumes that have taken up valuable space for too long.

As I've noted previously, I now assiduously avoid books with gratuitous violence in them or those that, like way too much of contemporary American fiction, are all plot and no action. In other words, they're all about what happens and not who it happens to.

I've discovered a real partiality for Canadian authors as well as the Brits that seem to be my natural reading allies. That's been en eye-opener! And I keep pushing myself to understand why. It's not that I purposely avoid American fiction but that not much of it suits me. I mean—Jams Patterson? Stephen King? John Grisham? And Sue Grafton's tiring alphabet books or the extraordinarily tedious Jodi Picoult?

Nope, no thanks. I want to know and enjoy the people in my books.

Which brings me to this little biography of Jane Austen by Carol Shields, a Canadian author. As much as I cherish Jane, I've never read a bio of her. This one is a little different, looking at the author's life in terms of her work as a novelist. It's pretty short and a good read. Made me think about my own work as a writer, about how routine is important because you need space for contemplation. And how society—not too much—is equally important.

I think that may explain why I get so off course when there's chaos in the house. Jay's been putting down flooring in our upstairs so the furniture and some of our cabinets have been arranged and rearranged for two weeks now. And it really puts me off kilter.

Glad it's almost done.