Easter Triduum Readathon

I have off work tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday. I took tomorrow as a vacation day, am not working a Saturday this week, and the library is closed Sunday for Easter. As a result, I am planning my own Easter Triduum Readathon starting tonight and running through Sunday. Tonight, I plan on finishing Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor, which I have been reading for Lent; tomorrow and probably Saturday too, I want to read All Things Wise and Wonderful, the third part (in the U.S.) of the All Creatures Great and Small series by James Herriot; Sunday, I am keeping it light with Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion by Neil Gaiman.

Tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., I am going to be offline and plan on going to a Good Friday service. I will be reading on a Kindle and am going to be listening to a few playlists of Holy Week music that I found and downloaded to my phone on Google Play Music, but I am not going to be on the Internet for those 12 hours.

Why I can do this is because my wife and I don’t have children, by choice, and aren’t able to go visit family this weekend. She works midnight shift all weekend and she and I both saw my side of the family on her birthday earlier in the month. I also don’t want to be going much of anywhere as I will be taking a new medication, prednisone, only for a 13-day stint, as I am starting physical therapy on Wednesday for a sore knee. I don’t know how it will affect me, although I have been given the litany of what could happen.

The litany includes the helpful advice of “BEFORE USING THIS MEDICINE…TELL YOUR DOCTOR: If you have a herpes infection of the eye. TELL YOUR DOCTOR: If have any of these health problems: A fungal infection or malaria infection in the brain.” Maybe it’s just me, but I think I would telling my doctor anyway if I had an infection IN THE BRAIN!

So both you and I are not too traumatized (only slightly traumatized, in other words, with that last thought hanging out in the back of our brains) I’ll leave you with something hopefully slightly less traumatic in keeping with the season :

Update Sunday morning, 4/21/19, 6:46 AM EDT: I didn’t make the Good Friday service, but did finish Leaving Church and started All Things Wise and Wonderful. Saturday’s plans went sideways, but in a good way as the weather was nicer than expected and the prednisone that I started Thursday morning kicked in and gave me extra energy. Highlights can be found on my Instagram account:
https://www.instagram.com/stillunfinished/. This morning, I am listening to music right now and will be reading Sunday Salon posts (and other blog posts from the past week) before reading more from All Things Wise and Wonderful. I probably won’t get to Don’t Panic today. I probably will dip into The Desert Fathers, the bookmail that I received recently from Deb Nance, the leader of The Sunday Salon. Click through to her blog to see her latest post and link up to the Salon, if you like, with your own post from today or earlier in the week. No Easter service for me because…well…Easter flowers. Sad but true.

If you celebrate Easter, how are you spending your Easter Weekend? If you’re not, what are your plans for this weekend anyway? Do they involve reading? And if they don’t, I’m totally judging you. 😉

What I’m Reading This Weekend…

**To join this week’s Sunday Salon, click here.**

Sarah Sammis of the blog Puss Reboots answered the often-asked question: “What are you reading this weekend?” with the fact that she doesn’t. Instead, she spends time with family, binges TV, and paints, she said. My own circumstance is a little different in that my wife and I have no children (by choice), she works a 12-hour shift Saturday (8 p.m.) into Sunday (8 a.m.) and then Sunday (8 p.m.) into Monday (8 p.m.) — which means she is sleeping for much of the day both days of a weekend, and I’m not an artist. So my own weekends usually but not always go like thism

If I’m not working at the library on a Saturday, usually once or twice a month, then I spend part of that day running errands and maybe some reading later in the day. Yesterday was different, though, as it was my wife’s birthday and I spent all day with her as she has a couple of days off from work. Growing up, I was taught and conditioned that Sundays are a day of rest. As an adult, I still try to adhere to that conditioning, because while my job isn’t as stressful as countless others, I deal with people a lot throughout the week and as an introvert, I need a day to rest. That rest includes, but is not limited to, reading.

I start my Sundays with reading and commenting on Sunday Salon posts, of which Sarah’s posts was one for this week, while listening to Guido’s Lounge Cafe on Mixcloud.

Then in the afternoon, if I’m not going to watch a NASCAR with my neighbor Mike in his ManCave, I read a book. For example, this afternoon I plan to start All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot.

For Lent, I am reading Leaving Church: A Memoir by Barbara Brown Taylor, which I will read later this morning as part of my morning devotions, part of my everyday reading routine. I also plan to continue reading “Like This or Die: The Decline of Criticism in the Age of The Algorithm” by Christian Lorentzen from the April 1, 2019 edition of Harper’s Magazine, which was offered free via Amazon Prime Reading this past week. From what I’ve read so far, it might good for other book bloggers, especially those who do or continue to review books regularly, to read.

So that’s what I’m reading this weekend or what I plan to read anyway. What about you? What are you reading this weekend? Or are you reading this weekend? If not, what are you up to and what are you reading during the week?

I read what I want…

…except when I don’t…

…read at all because I think too much about reading what others want me to read.

This is what has happened the past couple of weeks as I thought I should read two books that I don’t really want to read:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

Both might be, and probably are, fine books, but really it’s not what I want to read.

I think tomorrow, Sunday, which for me has become a day I read or at least make the attempt to read, I will read All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot. I already have read All Creatures Great and Small, and All Things Bright and Beautiful, and this is the third book in the series, according to the U.S. publication order of what originally was eight books in total in the U.K. The final two were published under the same titles on both sides of the Atlantic: The Lord God Made Them All and Every Living Thing. I think I will take a break from the series after this next one and finish those two later in the year, maybe during a couple of readathons.

Beyond that, I’m not completely sure, but I did clear most of my hold list at the library, except for Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. by Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of the band Wilco. This probably won’t shock you, for those of you have been “following” me for a while, but I’ll probably be reading a mystery of some kind after All Things Wise and Wonderful.

Over the last two weeks I have mentioned on the blog here about changes coming to the library where I work. Now that those changes have been made publicly, I can mention it here: starting in April, the library is adding Sunday hours, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.,, and changing its Saturday hours to the same times to be consistent.

For those of you in larger areas of population, that might not seem like a big thing. However, for those of us in small areas like where I live and work, it is…or can be at least in theory, especially in light of blue laws which used to be in effect across our state (Pennsylvania). Those laws are gone, but in our small town, a lot of businesses still operate under their shadow.

As staff, we are making the best of the situation while trying to get our heads around all of the implications for us personally and for the community. Intertwined for me with all this is that I’m turning 50 in June, which happens to fall on a Sunday, and I’m beginning to think/rethink what I’m doing with my life. And that isn’t all a bad thing.

Along those same lines, “think/rethink what I’m doing with my life,” my wife and I this past week decided to delete our Facebook accounts. She already has deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts, and I will be soon. We will be deleting our Facebook accounts at the end of Lent (April 18), to give us time not only to say goodbye to our friends, but also to download any photos we might not have other places and disconnect any logins we have with other accounts (example: signing in with Facebook for Goodreads). Our reasons why?

…and the subject of another blog post (or two, with one being from my wife, which she already is working on and the other one that I have yet to formulate). Stay tuned!

So do you always read what you want? Either way, what are you reading lately? Anything good?

In case you missed it, on Wednesday, I posted my look back at last month and my look ahead to this coming month.

Another trilogy, of sorts…

This past week I started another trilogy, of sorts…

The three books are the first in a series of five books, as published in the United States, with the last two being The Lord God Made Them All and Every Living Thing. However, I purchased these three together as a Kindle deal at the end of last year, so I’m counting them as a trilogy.

I also am reading The Lord of the Rings, still near the beginning of The Return of the King. I own that series in paperback, but started reading it in Prime reading and then purchased it in ebook in case the Prime deal ran out before I was finished with it.

I think I read at least All Creatures Great and Small when I was a teenager, because the stories so far seem familiar. I might also have seen some of the BBC series based on the books and the life of James Alfred “Alf” Wright, the British veterinarian who wrote as James Herriot. Needless to say, I am enjoying it so far and look forward to reading the rest.

With this week being Holy Week, I decided spontaneously yesterday to pick up some spiritual books yesterday on sale from Amazon — and also perhaps as penance for my not keeping to my planned Lenten fasts. The first three, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit, and Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life, are all by Henri J.M. Nouwen. The other two are by two different authors: Your Erroneous Zones: Step-by-Step Advice for Escaping the Trap of Negative Thinking and Taking Control of Your Life by Wayne W. Dyer and Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most by Marcus J. Borg. All three authors are deceased, with the Nouwen books compiled from his coursework, journals, and unpublished writings by one of Nouwen’s longtime students Michael Christensen and Rebecca Laird. Each are short, so who knows maybe I’ll even read a few over this coming week, especially since my wife Kim is away again for most of this week, visiting her mother and sister in Delaware.

This past week, though, Kim and I enjoyed watching a couple of movies together: Lady Bird, which we predicted correctly was “our kind of movie,” and the new Jumanji, which actually lived up to the hype from its trailers. Yes, it was completely silly and fluff, but it was good silly and good fluff, especially with all four of the leads: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan, the last who was excellent as Nebula in the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies and who was a welcome surprise addition here.

So how was your week this past week? Been reading anything good, watching anything good, listening to anything good?