Podcast & Book Recs

[neadods]

American iTunes has picked up a BBC Radio 4 podcast called "Shakespeare's Restless World." It's 13 episodes, each running slightly over 13 minutes, about political events in Shakespeare's time. Although the narrator has a slightly disconcerting habit of referring to things that we can't see ("This is an example of a silver whatsit" or "Where I am..."), I'm finding it an interesting listen.

I had an epiphany today - I'm suddenly buying a bunch of books because I'm actually trying to buy a lazy weekend with nothing to do but read a good book. Which is a bit much to ask Barnes and Noble to deliver.

That's not stopping me from reading books...

A Jane Austen Education was a great deal more charming and a lot less navel-gazing than I expected it to be throughout. In fact, it's given me new eyes for Persuasion (which needs a reread) and encouraged me to take another run at Mansfield Park, despite having failed 3 times to read it before.

And despite my absolute inability to wade through The Turn of the Screw again, (ye gods, that's turgid!), I have high hopes for Florence and Giles. It's a book that's going to demand to be taken on its own leisurely terms -- the second paragraph is a single sentence* -- but that sentence is built of gorgeously evocative words and phrases such as "a house uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence, a neglect of a place... leaked and rotted and mothed and rusted."

I think the bedroom and library cleaning can go for a little while longer. I may have found me a book that takes precedence this weekend no matter the chores waiting.


*Nowhere near the run-on winner; I think I still have my copy of The Pyrates, in which the first sentence ends halfway down the second page.

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

I know the feeling. In my case, I've been able to put off doing much book-buying by focusing on the amount of unread fanfic lurking on my Kindle (though occasionally there are sales and I find myself stocking up while it's cheap, like the Patrick O'Brian spree a month or so back) -- but it becomes a source of minor stress, thinking about all that stuff waiting to be read that I don't have time to get to, and having too many weekends where I'm too busy to lie around reading for hours on a Saturday afternoon... (Or, too many at-home hours that could be spent on reading, but I feel obligated to clear things off the DVR, or knit something too complicated to do while reading. And the Olympics are starting tonight, which is going to pretty much eat any at-home reading time I would have gotten for the next couple of weeks...)

[neadods.livejournal.com]

but it becomes a source of minor stress, thinking about all that stuff waiting to be read that I don't have time to get to

I know! But at the same time, you're still trying to get that feeling of sitting down all the more when you're stressing about trying to get through all that stuff.

[fyrdrakken]

Mind you, the benefit of turning reading fanfic into a perceived obligation is that just sitting around reading for a few hours starts to acquire the virtue of productivity, while remaining something genuinely enjoyable to do.