Well I hadn’t planned on filing another multiple day summary for my reading journal to end the week as I did for the week before, but that’s what’s appeared to have happened. A combination of blogging and Real Life combined to keep my reading down somewhat towards the end of the week, so the thought of posting any reading journal entries seemed a bit extraneous.
That said I did manage to work my way through Castle Freeman’s All That I Have (Duckworth). I’ll be putting up my official afterthoughts on that as soon as I can, but as a taster I’ve got to admit that I really enjoyed it. Freeman has this amazingly ability to capture the essence of small town living – not overly surprising given that he himself is wholly accustomed to small town living, but credit where it’s due because I live in a small(ish) town and I wouldn’t know the first thing about capturing my town’s essence. Anyway, that’s all I’m saying about All That I Have for now, more on that in my afterthoughts post.
It’s been a great month of reading so far for me, and I sincerely hope that January is a sign of the reading prospect ahead in 2010. All That I Have was my third read of the year so far (Killer by Dave Zeltserman (Serpent’s Tail) [afterthoughts] and Bequest by Anna Shevchenko (Headline) [afterthoughts] were the other two), and all of them have turned out to be exceptional reads. So a promising start indeed. Here’s hoping it keeps up.
::Monday’s reading plans::
- It’s ‘Maupassant Monday’ so two Guy de Maupassant shorts to tick off. I want to give a different translator a try so I’m actually going to take my choice of stories from the new (to me) Oxford University Press collection I picked up last week, A Day in the Country and Other Stories. The first two in the collection are Out on the River (online version) and Simon’s Dad (online version), so this is the two I’m going with.
- It’s back to Arthur Miller today and the next story in Presence: Collected Stories (Bloomsbury). I finished the first short story collection in this collected works (I Don’t Need You Anymore), last week and so I move on to a single story, which was first published in limited edition as such in 1992, called Homely Girl, A Life
- I also hope to be making a start today on my latest novel read, The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah (Canongate), but it all depends on whether or not I can find the time to get my forethoughts down for it
So a busy reading day ahead, but whoop I’m really excited about it 
. Enjoy your reading day folks. See you tomorrow!
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