i've been reading

i've been reading a little bit lately, although i haven't done as much as i would like. i finished the last book in the maisie dobbs series, elegy for eddie, and enjoyed it. i enjoyed the whole series. winspear's books are great - well written, fun mysteries that can be fun, light reading if you feel like it, but also have some deeper themes if you want to put a little thought into them. i'm a little sad to be caught up with the series because they've been a steady part of my reading diet for the past few months.

about a month ago, i came across this list of parenting books.  the latest antics of our four year old have been giving me a little run for my money and i like this woman's book recommendations on her blog in general, so i thought i'd give some of them a go. as in, i put in hold requests for about eight of them at our library. the problem is, i'm used to a slower library system and a bunch of these came to me at once. i don't do well with a stack of books waiting for me on my nightstand and especially a nonfiction stack. i get anxious and start several at once. and if i'm trying to read nonfiction at the same time (maisie dobbs), the nonfiction almost always wins out. i know this about myself and you'd think i'd do something to fix it. but i don't.

anyway, i started the parents we mean to be first and got a couple of chapters into it before i quit on it. it's actually a fine book, but it's not really light reading and the main message seemed to be, "teach your children charity" (although he never used that word). since that is already my main goal in life and i feel like the gospel gives me a framework for that, i decided to stop reading instead of forcing my way through the book.

another book that i picked up at the same time was house thinking, by winifred gallagher. this didn't end up being what i thought it would be. i thought it was going to be a guide on how to improve various rooms in your house to fit their function and match it with aesthetics, but it was more of a history of how rooms came to be what they are and if you dig deep, you could get some ideas from it, but i wanted them handed to me and it wasn't happening. the book was a little too much of a chore for me to read and i only made it half way through.

in defense of the original list, i think i'm just mostly not in the mood for any kind of heavy reading right now. both books were well written, just too dense for my mood. also, i'm currently reading another one of the books on the list and it is a little lighter and i'm really enjoying it so far. i just picked up our mutual friend, by dickens, at the library today, as well as another parenting book that showed up from my list, so hopefully i don't fall into some of the same problems i was having with these books.