#reading

I picked up Charles Baxter's THE FEAST OF LOVE last August at a real low point because a stranger told me it was their favorite book. I always ask people their favorite movie or book and they typically say either that they have lots of favorites (wild how few people know the definition of the word favorite) or else they give some sort of mock-embarrassed shrug and name something popular and trite. But this person said THE FEAST OF LOVE so I bought it and have been reading it in drips and drabs for nearly a year.

It bounces between the perspectives of different ordinary people. It's lovely and moving but wasn't especially engaging. There's a woman who is sleeping with a married man and then starts dating someone else. She ends up marrying the latter but fails to fall out of love with the former so they divorce and she goes back to the married man. It made me irrationally angry, as every affair in a book or movie always does. Which made me wonder why I always relate to the cuckold rather than the lover.

Anyway, it was well done but I doubt I'll give it much thought.

Rewarded myself after a long visit to the dentist yesterday with a trip to the Strand. Mostly to look for a copy of Strong's Concordance, which they didn't have, but in the section where it would have been, this little book on Mary Magdalene caught my eye (my interest kindled from the recent read of HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL). Then I had the idea to buy a French novel to see if throwing myself into the deep end might bear any fruit. It's interesting to slowly crawl over a sentence as one might when one is four years old.

Currently reading.

I've been so in arrears with fines for permitless parking at the Middletown train station, I'd taken to just driving to Manhattan during the week. Finally got the fines cleared up and am happy to be liberated from alternate side parking and able to enjoy train reading, such as this delectable tale of Gothic Romance and affordable downtown real estate.

Previous post referring to being back in the swing of things was a bit premature as I wound up spending some time in Nashville for my friend's birthday. So today is really the first day fully back to real-life after the Holidays.

As per New Year Resolutions, I impressed myself by running 1.4 miles at 7mph this morning. Curious how long I could really go. Interesting how much of a mental thing it is. Not like it's totally effortless, but I think my stopping point is largely defined by boredom. Last spring when I really started trying to run, my first big feat was running a ten-minute mile, which amounted to 6mph. So it's progress anyway, though I weighed in at 161.5, representing a holiday accumulation of something like 5-9 lbs...

Church attendance isn't starting well, missing both Sundays thus far, but did start a daily reading plan on the Bible app that I've stuck with and gotten back into my DuoLingo French, which wasn't a resolution but is still nice.

Need to carve out a plan for the short fiction goals, but did take time to review a chapter of Roebuck last night, which I'll hopefully repeat tonight.

#toread