Thursday, January 03, 2008

Reading light?

I looked back through my book journal (offline) to see what I had read throughout 2007, some of which I talked about here. I read a surprising amount of non-fiction early in the year -- a study of Virginia Woolf, a history of 20th century warfare -- and then lots of rather heavy novels and the new biography of Edith Wharton. My reading definitely tended toward the "serious" and several of them were real doorstoppers! And I never even made it to War and Peace, as intended. So now I'm thinking I might need to lighten up a little this year and put W&P off a little longer. Of course, I'm in the middle of Stendhal's The Red and the Black right now, which isn't exactly The Notebook. But after that, maybe I'll try something in the fantasy genre for a change of pace. I haven't seen any of the movie versions, but I'm thinking about the novel I am Legend, since no one ever thinks the movies do it justice.

I've mostly been thinking about music and getting my collection moved to my new iPod (thanks, hubby!). It's very cool to have all my favorite songs so handy, but there's so much stuff to collect, it's overwhelming. Also, I've been making noise on my guitar. I know it would be smarter to learn to play Kumbaya first, but who really wants to play that? I 'd rather make my ears bleed trying to play an actual cool song (with easy chords!) -- at least it's not boring. Maybe I'll finally learn to play *something* this year. My fingers still get sore and I don't think I'm much closer to learning how to strum. That whole music-math connection is intimidating to me, because I never got the hang of that either. It's like there is this whole compartment of my brain for those kinds of smarts that I can't unlock. It looks like it should be easy and straightforward, but it's so NOT for me.

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