Staying on course to start the year

So last weekend after rethinking my first book of the year, this past week I pretty much have been doing what I planned to be doing with my reading.

I’ve been reading a chapter a day from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations each day this week so far in the mornings before I go to work and plan to continue that through to next Saturday, with 12 chapters altogether. Then in the evenings after work, with the exception of last night, I’ve been reading Becoming by Michelle Obama, which will be my first book read this year when I am finished. I had planned to finish by last night, but I now am thinking it will be by the end of the weekend.

I still am looking ahead to my own Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend Readathon next weekend as I have next Monday off from work. However, instead of starting a reread of Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 that I read more than 20 years ago, I am going to start reading Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65. Then once I finish that, I can go on to the final part of the trilogy, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68 in hopes of of finishing the series by the end of the year.

I also picked up at the library two books of collected speeches of King that I want to dip into over next weekend.

Lest you think it’s all too serious, on Thursday night, Kim and I watched Stranger Than Fiction, a not-so-typical Will Ferrell movie about an IRS tax agent who discovers he is a character in a book that is being written. I can’t believe that we took so long to get to it.

Last night, we also watched Wild Rose about a fictional Scottish singer wanting to go to Nashville that also was very good. But the one I recommend for you all in keeping with the literary theme of The Sunday Salon, of which this post is a part, is Stranger Than Fiction.