The Terror of Knowing

Another Friday, another Friday Reads. Another week has gone by, folks, and the world keeps on turning on…

As you may have seen in last week’s Friday Reads post, I foolishly decided to try reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, because I’m a masochist, apparently. If I’m being honest, when I decided to set one of my 2017 Resolutions as ‘read 4 classics’, I wasn’t really intending to tackle long classics, as I know this tends to burn me out. However, I had an odd urge to just get over the intimidating nature of War and Peace and give it a try, so here I am, a week or two later, and only 200ish pages into it, but feeling rather good about myself despite that poor progress! So, needless to say, I’m still reading War and Peace this Friday and this upcoming weekend (and for many more weekends to come I should imagine!) and I’m actually really enjoying the story. Admittedly I am enjoying the “peace” bits more than the “war” bits but I expected that and I think that’s mainly down to my own horrendous lack of knowledge of Russian history, let alone military history, so I can’t really blame Tolstoy for my own failings!

Aside from War and Peace, I’ve got into the habit of having my audiobook on-the-go be a re-read, mainly so that I don’t feel like I’m procrastinating reading new books in favour of re-reading old ones. I don’t know quite how that works considering I’m still devoting quite a bit of time to it, regardless of whether I am physically reading it or listening to it, but on a psychological level it seems to be working for me. (Shhh, don’t question the faulty logic!) So, my current audiobook is Sabriel by Garth Nix. I was delighted to find my library had this on Overdrive and borrowed it immediately. It’s read by Tim Curry who has a fantastic voice for audiobooks, and his voice is especially fitting for the character of Mogget the cat who is funny and condescending but also sneaky and maybe evil under the surface… Tim Curry’s voice just oozes that so the audiobook is proving to be great so far.

And, because having two mediums of reading in-progress simply isn’t enough, I’ve also got an ebook on-the-go, as of lunchtime today. Unsurprisingly, politics is frustrating me lately (two words – Brexit… Trump), and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon. I frequently shake my head in despair at the news headlines I’m hearing every single day; I just surreptitiously turned off the reception area’s TV in my workplace because I couldn’t stand listening to it any more. And because I am incapable of letting go, I decided to start reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope – one, because Obama; two, because that is an amazing title; three, because he’s a very eloquent writer; and, four because I don’t read nearly enough non-fiction. That seems like plenty of reason to give this a read, finally.

As far as this weekend in general goes, I cannot wait to be done with work for the week, it’s just been strangely busy with lots of little bitty things to get done, and that hasn’t left that much time for anything else. I am looking forward to closing the office door this afternoon and not thinking about it for a couple of days. Myself and Liz are gym-ing this afternoon after work so we’ll see if I can truly close that door and not think… hopefully being so knackered from the gym will aid that utter lack of thought!

My weekends are low-key as a rule but since Liz is off too (yay) we have a couple of outings planned – this weekend should include a Tavern breakfast and a trip to the cinema to finally see La La Land, both of which will be amazing. I’m hoping to get caught up on blog posts and reviews I need to upload too, so hopefully I can productively use my weekend and do those. We’ll see, though, I am notorious for doing next to nothing, if given the chance – watch this space…

So, those are my likely reading plans for today and heading into the weekend ahead. Do you have any Friday Reads posts? Or perhaps just some fun plans for the weekend? Let me know in the comments!

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