Bout of Books 33: Wrap-Up

 I did OK on the Bout of Books readathon this time, though as I thought it would, prepping for a new semester took up more and more of my time by the weekend. 

I finished The Lincoln Highway in time for my Wednesday night book club, and since I had only started it on Jan 1 and it's almost 600 pages long, I count that as a win. I really enjoyed that book, and now plan to read the two other books by Amor Towles that have been on my TBR for a while. We had a long and involved conversation about this book, especially trying to understand the meaning of the ending.  If the ambition was to write "the Great American Novel," and throw in a lot of literary references, perhaps it's an allusion to the ending of the Great Gatsby with a particularly cruel twist: 

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past." 

I started Alan Wald's Exiles from a Future Time, though I did not get very far into it, because I was prioritizing a book related to my teaching preparation, There Goes My Everything which, despite the bad review in the New York Times, is very good and has been helpful for my class prep in a number of ways - alerting me to collections of documents and oral histories that I can share with my students, for example.  At night, as I was falling asleep, I read about 80 pages in Peter Swanson's The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, which I'd bought ages ago when it was featured in a $1.99 ebook sale. It's off to a good start, though I keep reading it after such long days that I fall asleep after a few pages. I've been listening to podcasts while I work out, so I didn't make that much progress in S.A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland, but I will get back to it in my next bout of house cleaning. 

In honor of the freight-hopping section of the Lincoln Highway, here's Jimmy Forrest doing "Night Train" in 1951

Bout of Books 33: Jan 3-9th 2022

Once again, I'm signing up for Bout of Books!

What is Bout of Books? From the creators:

 The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 3rd and runs through Sunday, January 9th in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 33 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team.

I've signed up for this challenge multiple times. Sometimes I read some books and blog about them, but it often falls during the very first week of classes for me, a time when I'm usually too busy to read - much less blog about reading. This time, it falls in the last week of my winter break, just before classes start. That means I'll probably have some time to read, though a lot of the reading will be work-related. I've been planning to read a book about how to do family history, since the main assignment in my one of my classes is a family history, and I feel like the students need more support and structure than what the textbook materials I've been using provide. I also want to read at least some of the book There Goes My Everything by Jason Sokal, though I see it was panned by James Goodman in the NYT when it first came out. Mostly, though, I'll be reading The Lincoln Highway which is the next book for my book club, which meets during the week of the readatahon, so I'll be reading as much as I can per day before then, in between bouts of syllabus revision.