Spinning.

Been in a major reading funk lately, and by lately I mean most of the year.

Highlights:

– After reading Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia I had two venomous snakes come to visit right by my door within a short space of time. First a nice-sized copperhead under my front step, and then a big old angry rattlesnake under a tree nearby who rattled and fussed and kept me stressed out for a couple of hours before slithering his long, gorgeous self off. I did not attempt to take them up, but if a third shows up, I may start to feel the weight of some unknown omen.

– Managed to read The Tunnel by William H. Gass, which took an eternity and actually rather felt like digging a tunnel, appropriately enough.

– Made the conscious decision to get into manga, because I wanted more fluff in my life and I have long envied what appeared to be the unadulterated enjoyment had by those who read the stuff. I am a fully grown lady who eats sweets with calculated, stern-faced pleasure, and I take the same determined attitude to reading comics.

 

Now, on to fresh business. I am participating in the Classics Spin over at The Classics Club, in which I pick twenty books I have yet to read from my list of classics, and I read the corresponding number that is randomly selected by October 6. I chose ten shorter books (under 450 pages) and ten longer books (over 450 pages), with a few I am eager to read and a few I am slightly less enthused about, to give them a fair chance. So I may find myself with a relaxed single-afternoon read, or a thicker slice of cake that’ll take a while to nibble through. I am excited either way. The list:

 

1. The Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair (112 p.)
2. The House Without Windows – Barbara Newhall Follett (134 p.)
3. Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (136 p.)
4. The Gowk Storm – Nancy Brysson Morrison (177 p.)
5. I Await the Devil’s Coming – Mary MacLane (200 p.)
6. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë (211 p.)
7. Elizabeth and Her German Garden – Elizabeth von Arnim (225 p.)
8. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (310 p.)
9. At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien (315 p.)
10. Emma – Jane Austen (391 p.)
11. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood (477 p.)
12. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (495 p.)
13. How Green Was My Valley – Richard Llewellyn (495 p.)
14. The Worm Ouroboros – E.R. Eddison (544 p.)
15. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell (546 p.)
16. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries – W.Y. Evans-Wentz (560 p.)
17. Ada, Or Ardor – Vladimir Nabokov (626 p.)
18. Wolf Solent – John Cowper Powys (640 p.)
19. Lorna Doone – R.D. Blackmore (646 p.)
20. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence (675 p.)