Bliss. A three day weekend to look forward to! I plan on getting in as much reading time as I can. Weekends always seem to be full of chores and errands, but I'm going to try and squeeze as much of that as I can in on Saturday (no carpet cleaning this weekend!), so I have the rest of the time free.
I'm already contemplating which books to try and concentrate on, so perhaps I can finish one or two. I've already finished a couple this past week and will have to get around to writing something about them soon before the stories start to drift away, but I wouldn't expect too much this weekend. My computer time will be reserved for catching up on emails and blog reading (am always catching up), so posts may be a little on the brief side.
And I might possibly start something new, since I have a lovely big pile of recently purchased books close at hand. Perhaps I'll share the rest of my new books tomorrow. When I finish a book I generally start something new (and have already done so), so any other books will be a weekend splurge, so I will have to consider carefully my choices.
I thought I might mention a few other things I'm reading, however. Rosamund Pilcher has put me in the mood for novels set during WWII, so I've recently started The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. I've loved everything I've read by her so far and I wholly expect to love this as well. She has a real talent for drawing readers (well, this reader anyway) into her stories from the first chapter. I know that this is a novel that moves backwards in time, beginning in 1947. At the moment I am trying to orient myself and understand how the characters relate to each other. Waters will introduce one or two and then switch to someone new and then later you'll discover they know each other or are related. She keeps you on your toes.
I've also started a book by a Spanish author, Luis Leante, called See How Much I Love You, which won the Alfaguara Prize. It's a love story and also a war story. I've read little Spanish fiction and have mentioned before I'm woefully ignorant of Spanish history, so I was excited to start reading this and it's another story that grabs you from the first page. I'm not terribly far into it, but it's set in the present day and in the 1970s when the Spanish withdrew from their only colony in the Western Sahara. The two lovers separate (by choice, though perhaps not by the choice of both) and find each other thirty years later. This is another novel that moves around in time, so I'm curious to see how the threads all come together.
And I was reading Joshua Zeitz's Flapper the other night. There's so much that I find interesting in this book and I hate that I'll never remember it all. I keep coming across things I want to share, but I'll keep this one brief. I found this so astounding:
"In 1920, Scott (Fitzgerald) earned a whopping total of $18,850 for his writing, a sum equivalent in today's money to about $176,000. Only $6,200 of his income came from royalties on the novel. The rest derived from eleven short stories that he published that year, including $7,425 that Hollywood studios paid for the rights to three of his stories and options on future works."
Isn't that amazing? How many contemporary authors can claim such a thing? Let alone short story writers! And he had only just published his first novel. No wonder he and Zelda lived the high life.
One last thing--RIP reading. I'm slowly getting into Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. I'm having a hard time shrugging off visuals from the not very good film adaptation (the most recent one) and it's slowing me down. Luckily the stories seem to be very different and as long as I think of the book in the period it was written (late 1950s) I'm okay. This is why I try not to watch a movie before reading the book! I think I'm also going to work on reading the short stories from Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now (the great NYRB Classics edition). It would work out to about a story a week. I've already read two of the stories, but they are well worth rereading! First up, "Don't Look Now", this Sunday.
Happy reading everyone!