#readthon wrap up

I tried.

I knew having work wouldn't be a great thing for reading and then a huge headache hit me, so not optimal conditions.
I did read, though. But not as much as I would have hoped.
And mostly I read social media management literature for work. Finished two short ebooks on that topic and started "The New Community Rules". Probably around 200 pages for that.

Other than that I finished one book ("The Bees") and audio-read one Poe story ("The Black Cat") as well as read another one ("The Puloined Letter"). I also read about 50 pages in "Die neuen Frauen" this morning.

So, yay, not bad, considering.
Right now I'm in the mood for another readathon, though. ;)

Should I Dewey's Readathon or not...?

So... should I? Even try? It's not a free weekend for me. I have to work on Saturday, so I'd be missing the first six hours or so...

Then again, I might as well try.

Okay. I'll try.

Here's what I'll be reading:

Poe. Of course. I'm not on track with the daily tales and will try to catch up. There's a few short ones coming up, so I'm aiming for at least three tales on Saturday.

Either I've finished "The Bees" before the readathon starts, or I'll finish it first thing.

Then: I might be starting "The Circle". Just because it's right in front of me and it's such a pretty looking book. I'm really in love with the hardcovers lately. I might read a few pages in my Erika Fuchs book, or even start "The Handmaid's Tale" (well, re-start, I've read like 30 pages or so a week ago). And also: A book about women in Germany from 1890 to 1914, very interesting!

#fridayreads - Every other Friday still counts, right?!

Ooookay,... I'm still reading "The Bees". I really like it, I'm just not reading a lot these days and so it takes forever even to read a short book. But I'm really enjoying it.

I finished listening to "Our Mutual Friend" this week and have not yet really picked another audio book for my car. Partly because I'm trying to listen to some Poe tales on my MP3-Player to keep up to date with my (own) read-along.

But other than that I may be starting "Ready Player One" as my new commute audio book. Then again I'm kind of getting the feeling that "Neuromancer" is a kind of pretext for that one? So I feel like I should be reading that first. It's also on my TBR right in front of me.

I tried to read "We Three O", which has a very interesting premise, but then I really couldn't. The kindle version had too many typos or editing errors to make it easily readable and then the dialogue was really not... good. So I just stopped. Sad, because the story and idea sounded so promising... (a humankind with three sexes instead of two and also something about a disease...)

(... I need to stop with the "..." ... I probably won't, though...)

And on a non-fiction front I'm checking out some (mostly German) books on financial accounting... yep, that's happening. And the weird thing is, that it pleases me. FA gives me joy! (I'm also trying to follow a FA class on Coursera and enjoying that, too!)

In other news: I finally bought three single shelfs and hope to put them up soon so I can finally have some designated shelfs for MBR-books. That will be wonderful because then I don't have to keep them on my coffee table anymore (I need to have them in immediate reach!) and that means my poor books will have less coffee stains! So, yay!

Oh, and if you're reading this, also check out the Poe Read-Along!

Starting now: The Poe Read-Along (Oktober, November, December)

I wanted to announce Poetober, but yeah, okay, that's not what we'll call it.
But I desperately need distraction in October (and November and December) and Edgar Allan Poe will do that.

I've been wanting to re-read Poe's short stories for ages and here's my - and your! - chance to do that.

I'll be reading this collection of Poe's work (this includes poems, too, but I'll just go for the tales for the time being):

Complete Tales and Poems

And as there are 73 stories in the first half of this collection (the second half is the poems), this Read-Along will start on October 6th and last for 73 days (i.e. end on December 17th).

Who's in? Just let me know in the comments or on Twitter (I'm @EdSpook). Everyone is welcome, the more the merrier!
Participation is not a strict thing, btw! If you feel like actually reading along all the stories with me, you're more than welcome! But if you only feel like discussion one or two stories, that's just as fine!
There's gonna be a goodreads group here: Poe Read-Along 2014
And the Twitter hashtag shall be #poeRA

If there are enough interested participants, I think a hangout would be fun, or some other live event. And whatever may come off it.

Happy Poe reading!

#FridayReads - again, otherwise I won't blog...

So, what's up with books here?
I finished "Ancillary Justice" this week. I really liked it and it definitely made me want to anticipate the rest of the trilogy. And it also got me back in the SciFi mood.

I finally found our copy of "The Name of the Rose" (because I knew we had to have one; I do not think that there is a household in Germany that does not have at least one copy of this book...) and started reading it! Yay! I've been wanting to read it ever since Linda Hutcheon kept mentioning it her book I had to study for my exams.
And then I found out that there's a buddy read at the booktube buddy reads group and I'll definitely try and join that. But first I need to make some progress with it.

And I got back into my car audio book, which is a wonderful reading of Dicken's "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11292942-our-mutual-friend" by Mil Nicholson.

So I'll hopefully be spending the weekend reading...

#Friday Reads aka an UPDATE!

Oooo-kay... so I'm back. Back to reading, back to blogging hopefully.


It's still Friday, I'm on vacation, I just (like 10 minutes ago) finished a book, so I thought a #FidayReads was in order.

So what am I reading?

I just finished "Der Gang vor die Hunde" aka "Fabian" or "Going to the Dogs: The Story of a moralist" by Erich Kästner, which is still as brillian as I remembered it and the new edition (the originally intended version) is even better. And I'll write a review about this one.

Two days ago I started "Ancillary Justice" as my designated beach book and that worked out well so far. Im a good hundred pages in and liking it so far. I have a kind of a hard time actually folling the who's who against whom of it, but that might still be coming and it doesn't take away from the reading experience of it.

For a non-fiction I'm reading "Selbst Denken" (German, obviously), a book about how astonishing it is that people do not like to use their brains and actually draw their own conclusions about stuff, but rather just follow whatever is told by media, social media, politics, what have you. I'm only in the first third of it and it reads very swiftly and I find myself constantly nodding along (bad sign with such a book? ;) ), but nothing really new so far. It feels like I'm not really the actually intended addressee (yes, I checked, there's just so many d's, s's and e's in that word), as I'm not leading a live of pure meaningless and mindless consumersim with three SUVs and a new set of clothes every month.
So I do not agree with all the conclusions and interpretations of facts by the author, but it still does contain interesting facts and food for thought.

Coming up for air...

Okay, so, well. Starting this blog right before my final exams started was not an especially smart move, but that's what I do...

I was planning on updating here much more, but the end of May has been pretty crazy busy (studying and work) and the last weeks were just frenzied studying. Also, although I'm reading a lot (studying for lit exams does that to you), I don't read a lot I want to blog about... and even if I would want to, I certainly don't have the time to think about writing a review or any such thing.
So, what I read and maybe might be worth an extra post at some later time are "The Overcoat" by Gogol, some stories by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and maybe a history book "Catherine the Great" by Madariaga, which I found to be a great (and relaxing, compared to Russian lit) read.

So, yeah, that's it for now. Mid week I'll switch to Spanish lit, we'll see how that goes.