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
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