Sunday Salon: Reality check and "falling" forward

For a couple of months, I have posted big long lists of my determination reads for that month. Well, I am finally joining reality and accepting that I won't be finishing all the books I'd planned on this year. This is okay. I really am not accountable to anyone for my reading, well no one besides myself. Life and circumstance have just impinged on my reading more than usual. But since I do have a family and a life, I am deciding to let it all go and just do what I can without the guilt. And this is going to have to apply to things beyond the bookish in my life.

So with the advent of fall, I am making a resolution to be okay with whatever I can offer. I already have to squeeze the books in around the family life so this is really just an open acknowledgment of that. The seasons play into my reading time as well. For instance, right now I feel more compelled to be outside enjoying the grogeous fall weather than inside on the couch reading. So I'm going to be. And I know my weedy flower beds will appreciate the attention! As for today, with luck I'll squeeze in some reading time between the tennis match for one child and the Nutcracker headshots followed by a rehearsal for another. Dinner must happen somehow in all of that but since my current book has me by the throat, I suspect we'll be eating leftovers again.

I read 13 books in September despite several small reading slumps. This past week in particular (both September and October), I whizzed through Regency England watching as a proper English gentlewoman fell in love with a rustic American colonial. I traveled through the Rocky Mountains with an gently-bred Englishwoman as she wrote letters home about her amazing journey. And I grew up beside a boy in small town Michigan in the 50's and early 60's. The start of this week finds me in a time and place not unlike our own, which is being slowly consumed by a plague while a new stepmother tries to knit her new family together.