Here’s another book reading update, since nothing else is happening in my life other than, you know, living life.
I finished In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and immediately realized something was wrong. See, when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, I do it by percentage completed. StoryGraph then translates that into number of pages read for some reason. It was reporting that I was reading something like 1200 pages a day. I do not have that capacity OR time. Turns out, In Search of Lost Time is a massive book! ISOLT is about 4000 pages. Compare that with War and Peace, which peaks at about 1400 pages depending on the edition you’re reading. It took me the better part of two years to read War and Peace. Yet I was done with BBC’s radio rendering of ISOLT in, oh, under a week!
I then started wondering if I should read the original text, just to get the parts I didn’t cover in the audiobook. I have shelved that project for now. I want to refresh my memory of this story some other day year.
Since then, I finished Flux by Jinwoo Chong – a wonderfully sad story about Korean identity in the US, a female protagonist who is eerily similar to Elizabeth Holmes, and some sci-fi thrown in for good measure. It reminded me of Embers, which too was about a life not well lived.
I’m currently listening to The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis. I picked it up in Libby on a whim and it’s been a nice ride! I’m still on the fence about historical fiction, though leaning in than out at this point.
I’ve also started reading Scent of a Garden by Namrata Patel. I am not sure about Diaspora authors. I’ve tried before and failed to find a footing. Maybe this one will change my mind?
Slow progress on Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, which is an excellent retelling of the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. I am surprised to discover the details of the lives of these two extraordinary women. The only reason this process is going slowly is because of changes at home. I no longer have the ability to sit and read for a long period of time. Instead, I’m able to use that same time to audiobooks. This may change over time. Let’s see.
I’m at day 148 of reading daily.