Hm.

I swore that I would not abandon this blog.

She says a month and a half from the previous entry.

To be fair, things have been nuts. Teaching, taking classes, wedding planning, dealing with my mom being sick, etc. Absolutely insane. There hasn't been a whole lot of time for reading for pleasure; to be honest, there hasn't been much time for reading for school either. Articles here, articles there, library books scattered everywhere with Post-it notes in the margins.

And in the meantime, Bergie is howling. I think he's lost in the house somewhere. But why should that be any different than normal?

Anyway. First, a couple of updates on the Kindle - I figured out how to turn off the highlighting feature, so it doesn't show other people's notes. However, I can't make the highlighting feature work consistently for my own highlights. More meddling to come. Also, the battery lasts way longer than the previously discussed three weeks. Which is awesome. I will say that, since I am using many of the free books, it paid for itself within 24 hours of me having it.

Still, some of the pricing on new books is ridiculous. I'd been looking forward to The Reckless Bride for sometime. I checked on Amazon to see how much it was for the Kindle--the same price as it was for the regular book - $7.99. (btw, what is up with book prices these days? Honestly, it's ridiculous!)

So, I bought the book at Walmart for $5.84. Much more reasonable, and I have a solid, actual book that I can loan out, read in the bathtub without much risk, and resell to Half Price Books at a later date and actually get money out of. (This is why the Kindle won't kill the book market completely.)

Speaking of, The Reckless Bride was a decent close to Stephanie Lauren's Black Cobra Quartet. It wasn't spectacular, by any means; the ending was sort of contrived. There was a nice twist to the end that I never saw coming. Also, unlike The Brazen Bride, I didn't stop and go, "Wow, there's a ridiculous amount of sex in this." More than her other novels, certainly, but not eight scenes in the first 150 pages.

Also recently read, Side Jobs by Jim Butcher.

Excuse me while I squee a little bit.

First of all, there were a ton of stories that I'd never read. Mostly because I'm too cheap to go buy an anthology of short stories when I really only want one--namely, Dresden. Second, because there was an all new novella that took place forty-five minutes after the end of Changes.

Have I mentioned that Murphy kicks copious amounts of ass?

Also, there was a little bit of Harry/Murphy romance, and that made me happy. Buy it. Read it. Now.

The only other book that I've read completely (for the first time) was Jack Stillinger's Reading The Eve of St. Agnes. It's a scholarly work on Keats' poem and was decently interesting. The man is a scholarly genius and basically did all the work for my Keats presentation for me (no joke, it has everything you could possibly want to know. I wanted to take the book to class, say "read this" and have that be my presentation). Of course, I also have to find a new way to go about writing my paper, because Stillinger has done a lot of the work already, and if there's one thing hammered into your head in English programs is to be original and to contribute to the conversation. (I'm giving you my strained grin right now. It's hard to be original and to contribute to a conversation when your head is ready to explode with all the stuff you have to do.)

(By the way, College of Graduate Studies? You suck.)

I did also finally finish Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell and was immensely disappointed when I got to the end...and it was the end. The woman didn't have the decency to finish the book before she died! The main character pissed me off, because she was a doormat. She could have had everything she ever wanted if she just grew a pair and stood up for herself. No, in all seriousness, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently, Gaskell had a happy ending planned, so at least it didn't end on a completely depressing note. Still, all she was teaching her gentle readers was to be a doormat and everything will come to you.

It's a miracle we ever got the vote.

Anyway, that's a quick run down of the last month and a half of reading. Time for me to go to bed.