Sorry I haven’t been around — between work and illness, I’ve been negligent in my posting. But, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading! I haven’t finished my week #1 read yet, but it’s proving to be quite involved — so, I’m taking some time to savor it. I’ve also started two other books, though, so all total, I’ve read the equivalent of at least one book. (I hope!)

Here’s what else I’m reading:

Dead and Gone (Sookie Stackhouse #9), Charlaine Harris



Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, Mark Epstein, M.D.

I’ll be back with some reviews once I’ve finished one of these three…and I promise to be more witty (and punctual) next week.

Happy reading! What you working on right now?

What better time to read origin myths than at the beginning of a new endeavor? I moderate two book clubs at the library where I work, one of them a speculative fiction club whose October theme is Mythology — but I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time anyway.

I just started reading Ka, by Robert Calasso. Here’s the description from Amazon.com:

With the same narrative fecundity and imaginative sympathy he brought to his acclaimed retelling of the Greek myths, Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India’s sacred texts, known by a secret name–”Ka,” or Who?
What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father’s skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king’s wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible.

That’s some pretty high praise. And you should look at the reviews on Amazon.com. I’ve always loved mythology, and I don’t know nearly enough about Hindu myths, so this should be fun. Let me make some progress, and I’ll get back to you…

What are you reading this week?

I work in a library, and we participate in a program called The Big Read. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, it’s an initiative begun by the National Endowment for the Arts in response to a study whose results showed that people don’t read for pleasure anymore. The aim of the program is to get everyone in a single community to spend a month reading the same book at the same time — not as a school project, or because they otherwise “have to”, but just for the pleasure of reading and the excitement of discovering a new book.

I keep a reading log. (Did I mention the librarian part? Don’t look so surprised. I order my personal book collection by Dewey decimal number too, natch.) Updating the log recently, I thought, “That’s all I’ve read in the past 12 months? Really?” It was 26 books, which comes to one book per two weeks; as is the case for most people who read, it wasn’t spread out evenly over the year, but that was the final count. I was surprised, as I’d really thought I’d read more. Thinking about the NEA study, and my own individual reading habits, I got curious as to what other people’s numbers might look like. I found this article: One in Four Read No Books Last Year, and a lot of people’s responses to it.

In a fit of the kind of impetuousness that Facebook so well encourages, I decided to post to the world (or at least my friends) my resolution: to read a book a week for the next year. That’s 52 books. I expected any responses I got to my Facebook posting would be something along the lines of teasing, if there were any responses at all. To my surprise, a bunch of people had something to say about my post, and most of them responded by saying “Oh cool, I want to do that too!” Hence, this blog. I could wait till January to start, but I’m not very patient. However, I also really like temporal markers (see the OCD symptoms above), so I picked the next annual landmark on the horizon — the first day of autumn, September 21st.

Clearly, I’m already reading a lot more than the average American, as do most of my friends. So, whether I personally read a book every two weeks, or every week, or every 2 days, isn’t going to change the statistic in the next survey like the one mentioned in that USA Today article I mentioned above. But perhaps that’s all the more reason to encourage the people who are reading to keep doing it. And if by making my endeavor public I recruit a few new readers, awesome. I like the way young adult author Robin Brande puts it, on her blog that, in part, serves as a forum for her own book-a-week challenge. To paraphrase: one way to help ourselves do something is to know that someone is paying attention to our efforts. Plus, it’s fun to share.

Ok, so here are the guidelines, if you want to come along.

• Try to read one book a week, starting on Monday, September 21st
• Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t finish your book in a week — this isn’t a competition, it’s only for yourself
• If you are so inclined, come here and post what you read each week, and if you’re really ambitious, what you thought about it. I’ll be marking my personal progress with a blog entry each time I finish a book, ideally each Monday. It would be cool if at the end of our 12 months, we had a nice long “recommended reading” list of everything everyone had read, so I encourage anyone who is following to at least leave a comment with the title of what you’ve read last.
• What you read isn’t important — it just has to be a book. Fiction, non-fiction, any genre, no length requirement. Just read.
• Have fun! (As I already mentioned — this isn’t a competition, it’s a book club!)

I know we’re all really busy. I don’t have kids, but I do have a full-time job, try to workout, try to keep in touch with my friends and spend time with my family, and am going back to school soon. My point is — let’s try to make time for reading. I see the learners who come out of my library’s adult literacy program (a program which teaches illiterate and marginally literate adults to read or improve their reading skills) and I’m reminded that reading really does change people’s lives.

So let’s get to it. I’m excited, how about you? I’ll post my first book choice later today. I hope you keep coming back!