April 17th

Day 108
The Eternal Husband and Other Stories 239-263, 17-21
A Room with a View 4-45
11.258 read, -3.008

And finally I'm now caught up.  I just did March 11th through April 17th all in one day!

What a day to catch up on too.  First it just happens to be day 108 which, anyone here a fan of Lost? ;)

Then, I've finished up all the stories and the introduction to The Eternal Husband and Other Stories.  Of course, since it's Dostoevsky it was all pretty drab and dismal, but so insightful and with much more unexpected humour than I was expecting.  Still, the stories really revolve around many strange, poor, sad/reclusive/misguided people.  I can't continue with Dostoevsky now but I really look forward to one day reading The Brothers Karamazov (I've already read Crime and Punishment).  And reading some of his lesser stories which I for the most part all liked, and seeing his entire fiction output isn't so oppressively huge, I wouldn't mind at some point banging out all of his works (the intro that spoke about other works whetted my appetite).  But not now.

So, finally, finally, FINALLY I was left in the position to now choose my own book to read (not a book club selection!) Well, also aside from the epics reads too.  And in fact, I might've chosen the Odyssey to start on but for two reasons.  One is I wasn't sure of the start date for our group read of it and two is that this time, I want to read the companion along *with* the book, not after, and I had to order the companion paperback on Amazon and its on its way and may be a few days, may be a few weeks who knows.  So in all events, I decided against the Odyssey right away and *finally* went to my list of pre-determined challenge reads for this year.

Remember those?  I listed them at the beginning of the year, and they're in my list post on mobileread.  My goal was to read all the book club reads, which I'm doing smashingly on, to read a certain amount of "whim" books, of which I've read a few (the epics and companions to them and such are considered "whims" since they fit in no other category for my challenge) but last and certainly not least, I picked 13 various titles that I wanted to have read by the end of the year and so far....I've read none of them!

LOL.  And a fourth of the year is already done. So I was very happy to be able to look at the list today and pick one off it to read.  I ended up going with A Room with a View.  A few reasons - Reading the Pevear translation of Dostoevsky reminded me of first picking out Pevear for Master and Margarita which was our very first pick for the inauguration of the Lit club.  And, Room with a View was the very first pick during my time with the general book club.  It was February of 2011 when I started, the category was Romance and I actually voted for Room and it won!  With ten choices every month, it's rare the one you actually vote for wins, so that was a great start.  Then I didn't finish reading it. Ha.  But I was determined to eventually get back to it, and it went on my challenge list as one of my halfway-read books that I wanted to finish this year.  So from Pevear translation to Forster, it's a bit nostalgic for my entrance into the clubs only last year!

Also, there's someone who's been harping on me to see the film ever since I mentioned a few months ago that I'm going to watch the film once I read the book.  So, I want to finish this book so I can watch the film and quiet them! :D

Also, it's rather short, so I thought it would be good for my first choice from the list, especially with a new club pick coming soon and Odyssey starting soon. Of course, next day (the 18th) I found our group Odyssey read won't start til May which is great, and at my pace of reading recently any length book I'd probably finish relatively soon, so all in all I don't think it matters so much whether I had picked a long or short one to read now.

But I'm happy with my choice and am enjoying it immensely.  This really is one of my favourite types of literature - a gentle English classic drama.  And it really has some great wit and barbs in it too.  Oh yes, and I love travel too, so I'm thinking by finish it may rank up there with my all-tme favourites.  But of course, perhaps not as well, I'm only at the beginning now so I don't know.

Funny though, I had thought I'd read about half of it, but opened it back up to find out I was only about 20 pages in, lol.  So seeing that, I just thought it'd be silly not to start from the beginning again fresh, so I did.

Well, here I am, I've been resolving to write shorter posts and here's a gigantic one!  I may as well call it a PM, right? ;)