It's Monday! And Pants Are Optional!

Hello, internet! I wish that I had something bookishly fabulous to tell you, but I have not been reading (*gasp*). I know that is a terrible thing for a book blogger to say, but two things happened:

1) I went on a family trip to New York City. I imagined that I would find myself steeped in literary culture and plow through scads of books. But instead I ate lots of carbs and walked for miles and burned up in the crazy heat. At night in the hotel room, it was all I could do to check Facebook to see pictures of other people’s vacations.

2)   I started Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. My book club chose this for a multi-month summer read. I left it until the last week, because that’s the kind of thing that I do.  It’s only 847 pages, so a totally reasonable choice, right? Well, I am stuck. Really stuck. Stuck on page 85 and unable to budge. Whenever I open that thing, my eyes blur and I switch back to Facebook.

My usual policy is to give a book 50 pages and abandon it if it’s not working for me. But so many people have loved this book, and it won the Man Booker Prize in 2013. And most importantly, I hate going to book club and not contributing. One person told me that I should break my rule this time and read to page 200 before making the decision about whether to abandon the book.  Sadly, I just can’t seem to get there.

Now that I’m back home, I’ve started Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone, which is one of my 2015 TBR Pile Challenge books. I’m not sure what I’ll choose after that. This isn’t exactly a reading slump, but I definitely feel like I’ve lost my groove.

I’ll leave you with a picture of The Strand bookstore in Manhattan:

And the stack of used books I bought for under $15:

And a photo of one of the many things in NYC that cracked me up:

Please bear with me, readers. I’ll be back at it again soon.