Getting My Reading Feet under Me

That's my task for the moment. I am in a terrible, indecisive quandary about what to read next. I am not at a loss for books--I have scads of delicious reads left unread. What I am is miserably unmotivated. Please let this be a temporary state! I have been enjoying magazines--The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, National Geographic Traveler, American Artist, and American Art Review.

I don't know about you, but, frankly, I was disappointed by the year 2010 in new books. I meant to devote an entire post to this topic last month, but I believe it's a bit too late to complain about that now--no crying over spilt milk, as my mother would say. By the way, at the age of 87, Mom is reading a nearly 1200-page tome, The Queen Mother, a bio published in 2009. She finds she can only read so many pages a day due to the small type, but she's enjoying it thoroughly. I couldn't find it for her in large print, but she says she's managing and is determined to read it. That's Mom: If she's determined to do something, no one can stop her.

Onward! Forge my way ahead! Pick up any book and start reading on any page, in any place. Just read, you fool!

OK. I may start reading A Tale of Two Cities, downloaded for free onto my Kindle. This is Ken's favorite of Dickens', with David Copperfield being a close runner-up. I loved both David Copperfield and Great Expectations.

I'd like to start taking a bite out of Brian Fagan's Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, published by Bloomsbury in 2010. I love Brian Fagan's nonfiction: the history, archaeology, climatology, and anthropology all mixed together. These are quirky interests of mine, which I enjoy indulging. I do find, however, that I tend to read Fagan while reading other works of fiction. His nonfiction can be dense, though I love it nonetheless.