May 9th

Day 130
18.006 read, -0.018
Homer's Odyssey, A Companion xii-xiv, 1-26
The Odyssey of Homer 29-61

I am SO CLOSE to being caught up with my goal!  It was just killing me that I couldn't completely catch up today, since as of yesterday I was only 38 pages behind and combined with my normal daily goal I only needed to read 80 pages to catch up.  But of course, I've finished the easy GoT which I could speed through and read over 100 pages a day, and now I'm with the Odyssey which is a bit more challenging.

Even if I were just reading the text to the Odyssey, it'd be somewhat easy compared to some things I've read this year (coughleavesofgrasscough).  But I'm not.  I'm in a way making a study of this.  The companion is basically annotations, but they are not noted in the text, so I never know really which lines are annotated.  But luckily, the companion breaks the annotations down into sections sort of by scenes in a chapter, and announces the line numbers of said section each time before beginning.  So what I'm doing is looking at the "scene" line numbers in the companion, reading that scene in the Odyssey and then going and reading the annotations for it in the companion right after, and then continuing onto the next scene.

I've found this is best.  I can't be going every few lines to see which annotations may have been made on them, that's just too cumbersome and anyway not preferable even if it weren't cumbersome, since the companion also posts general annotations relating to entire scenes before specific line by line annotations.  And I tried going book by book starting with book 1, but when I noticed the "scene" sections in the companion, I thought that a better way than entire books, more immediate and my mind will still be on that scene.

It worked great with book 2.  And then, book 3, the companion has the entire book as one scene lol, and that's as far as I've gotten.

And the way I'm reading is, the Odyssey on my e-reader, the paper book on the companion, my smartphone for any internet/wikipedia/google queries and a little notebook and pen for notes on the companion, of which I've made a few already (I can makes notes electronically for the Odyssey itself on my e-reader).  So that's quite a spread and it does feel more of studying but so be it.

I've described the above so it can become clear why reading the Odyssey is so much more time-consuming than say Game of Thrones, if anyone was curious why.  It was all I could do just to get to 60 pages today, when just the other week I got to 150 pages in a day with another book.  And what timing!  Right as I was about to catch up!  Couldn't GoT have been 100 pages longer so I could've caught up completely the next day and *then* started the Odyssey, lol?

But as it is it's still good.  If I can manage another 60 exactly tomorrow (the 18 I'm still behind plus the 42 I need to read daily) I'll be completely caught up, and then after that it's just 42 a day, whew.  Oh, well I am going on vacation in a few weeks, so I'll probably try to get a few hundred pages ahead so I can take a break during vacation if I want.