…to last week where I joined an online Haruki Murakami Book Club on a chat app called discord and also joined the 2020 Poetry Reading Challenge. Since then, I have decided to “unjoin” the book club and adjust my goals with the poetry reading challenge. My “unjoining” the book club has nothing to do with person who invited me to the group, but that I am not “feeling” the book right now and I also have mostly read the Murakami books I want to read. It also has to do with what I want to read right now, and that is, on the fiction front anyway, mostly older detective fiction.

On that front, last week on the blog, I talked about starting/restarting the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. On Thursday and last night, I did just that by reading and finishing Over My Dead Body, the seventh in the series. I also want to start/restart reading the Sherlock Holmes short stories. I don’t even know where I am in reading them, so I’m going to start over with the stories, skipping if I remember and then going on from there. I have the complete collection on Google Play Books so I can read them on my phone. While I’d prefer to have them on my Kindle   I now have the complete collection of novels and stories on my Kindle and am reading from there so I can keep track of where I am instead of forgetting where I left off.

With the poetry reading challenge, the option that I signed up for reading a poem-a-day through the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day service. The challenge, as outlined by Serena, is to read a poem-a-day for a week once per month and write about which poems were your favorite and why on your Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, or your blog. I am adjusting it to pick out my favorites from the month and write about them at the end of the month, providing links to the poems as well. Most likely, I will limit my choices to a few so as not to overwhelm you all.

I also have a plan for when and how I will read…

Short bursts AND long stretches

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t read well in short bursts. I prefer to read in longer stretches of time, which I usually am afforded on weekends, most Saturdays (except when I’m working at the library) and all Sundays. This is assisted by my wife working 12-hour shifts Saturday into Sunday and Sunday into Monday, which means I have more “free time” during the day to do what I want. I learned with reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius to start the year that I can read in short bursts. To that end, I want to read Sherlock Holmes during the week throughout the year, no specific deadline on when to finish or if I’ll finish this year, just to read a short story in the morning before work or in the evening Monday to Friday.

On the weekends, though, I still want to read in those longer stretches of time that I am afforded. On Saturdays, starting with today, I will go to the local state university I mentioned previously and read for the afternoon. Then on Sundays, as is my custom, I will read Sunday Salon posts in the morning and then books in the afternoon. At least that is the plan here at the start of February.

This Weekend

As for what I plan on starting to read today, I have a couple of possibilities. First, on the fiction front are two:

• Where There’s A Will, the eighth in the Nero Wolfe series, by Rex Stout.
• Heaven, My Home, the second in the Highway 59 series, by Attica Locke.

I’m leaning toward Heaven, My Home as it will dovetail nicely with the start of Black History Month in a book about a black Texas Ranger, authored by a black female.

On the nonfiction front this weekend, I plan on starting with How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I started this one last year but didn’t finish and it also coincides with Black History Month. Then next weekend, I would like to begin digging into Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65, the second part of Taylor Branch’s history of the Civil Rights Movement in America. I had planned to begin reading the latter on MLK Day but that didn’t happen (I finished the a book of King speeches instead). Based on the length of Pillar of Fire, it will be one I’ll be delving into over several weekends, not just next weekend.

As always, I’ll keep you posted here on my progress with these and other books throughout the rest of the month or the lack of progress thereof, but I’m hoping for the former.