ysobel: (Default)
masquerading as a man with a reason ([personal profile] ysobel) wrote2018-07-02 11:43 pm

Books, mostly

Had, unplannedly, quite a relaxing evening -- went to bed around 8 and after about ten minutes Monkey came and curled up on my chest. I put on an audiobook (started with a new one but was having trouble concentrating, so switched to Watership Down, which a) is a story I know well and therefore it wouldn't matter if I half fell asleep for a few minutes, and b) has a lovely soothing narrator IMO; I listen to audiobooks at 1.5 speed because they're too slow otherwise, but even so WD makes a wonderful and gentle listen) and just lay peacefully with a purring cat curled up on me. I had reiki this afternoon too, so I was pre-relaxed, and it was just ... a little piece of heaven, more or less.

(Amd I'm pretty sure I did doze in and out, because I don't remember the river crossing but we're past that, but that's why I chose WD. It's somewhat serial in nature, with the el-ahrairah stories and the sequence of adventures, and I know the plot well enough to know what I've missed when I zone back in.)

Only down side is I couldn't do much of anything on my tablet of course, because there was a cat blocking 75% of my screen, which meant there was a chance I couldn't get my daily duolingo completed. Which I was okay with because streak freeze, except when she got off me (at only 11, so I immediately switched to duo) it turned out that I hadn't done yesterday, so I very nearly lost the streak. Didn't, and SF is back on, but it's had the feel for a while of a wobbling spinner toy about to fall down, and I keep almost forgetting (or sometimes actually forgetting), so I'm probably going to end up crashing soon.

Incidentally, I registered for my library's summer reading program. There's always a small prize for signing up -- one year a tote bag, one year a coloring book, one year a small wooden puzzle toy -- and then doing things gets you entries into a grand prize drawing, which I think is a kindle preloaded with a shitton of books, though I'm not positive on that. Obviously reading is the main way to get an entry, but then you can get bonus entries by doing other things; the list changes each year but always includes going to a library event. And the signup prize this year? A free book. \o/ Granted ,it was a fairly small selection, but I ended up with The Maltese Falcon, which I'm oddly excited about reading.

I loved the summer reading program as a kid, and back then the *end* prize was a free book, which in my view was the best thing ever. Of course I am not the target demographic, in that I hardly needed encouragement to read. I don't know that more reluctant readers would consider a book to be that great a reward. But I still remember the awesomeness of getting a book that was *mine* (not that I lacked for available books at home, since my parents owned tons, but still), and there was one year, not sure how old I was but definitely on the older side, that the book I chose was Diary of Anne Frank, and at the time I felt slightly weird for being excited about getting a nonfiction book, especially one about the Holocaust, but finding it in the available books felt like winning the lottery.

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