book reading update, week 2
in journal
hello! as you can see*, it’s a beautiful saturday morning here in la paz, and we have a party to go to this afternoon outside of the city, but i wanted to write a quick update on how the book reading is going.
first off: i’m already behind on my 52-books-in-one-year challenge. surprise, surprise! 
i’m about 70% through Hild – i still like it quite a lot, but it’s very dense text, i can’t just skim over it like an albatross skims over the waves in the sea. (yikes, what a metaphor. and albatross? really, there’s got to be a better bird to use that has less doom and gloom associated with it. poor albatross.) nope, this book makes me pause and re-read and then mutter a bit out loud and so on. not because of its weighty ideas but because of the language – it’s gorgeous, yes, but oh my lordy, so archaic! and then it reads like a russian novel, with a billion and one characters, but at least they don’t each have half a dozen nicknames like good old Tolstoy. anyhow, so far, so good. i’m taking my time with that one.
but! i found a bunch of excellent fantasy/science fiction books in Spanish, actually written by Bolivians – which is so cool, because i don’t know Bolivian literature at all, much less literature in the fantastic genre which i so very much love. i found a collection of Andean mythology, and i swear my heart sped up triple-time when i spotted it. so awesome. also, i started reading an anthology of fantastic fiction yesterday called Vértigos and already read two stories. hooray!
and! i’ve committed to read Middlemarch by George Eliot – i have to have two hundred pages read by the end of the month. yup, a 900+ book, known for its weighty nature indeed.
so. reading this month is going swimmingly. knock on wood. happy weekend!
*this is part of the view from our bedroom & a big reason as to why we grabbed this apartment as soon as we found it. <3 you should have seen new years’ eve from here…!
