Life in mostly quarantine has continued without too much interruption to what feels like a normal routine. I have found myself reading more than usual though. So far this week, I have clocked around 8 1/2 hours with my nose in a book. While that’s not unusual for some people, when school is in its regular routine, I am lucky to read for 3 hours during any given week. It’s still rather early on a Saturday evening right now. I anticipate that my total for the week will exceed 9 hours of reading before all is said and done.
The first portion of the week was devoted to reading Jeffrey Archer’s lovely Only Time Will Tell. It is the first volume in his Clifton Family Chronicles. You can read more about my enjoyment of the first book in the series by checking out my review that appeared on this site earlier this week. I fully intend to continue making my way through the saga in the coming weeks, but I decided that I should probably tie up some other loose ends in my TBR.
I returned to the biography of Johannes Brahms that I have been “reading” since Christmas. This massive volume was a chore to plow through. Whenever I would actually pick up the book, I had to basically force myself to commit to reading a few pages before returning to something less academic. As I picked up the book again this week, I finally decided that enough was enough. I am not prepping to teach a class on the composer’s life and there are far too many books that I desperately want to read to continue torturing myself with this book because I “think I should.” So, with 200 pages behind me, I removed my bookmark and placed the biography on a high shelf in my apartment. The work is wonderfully written and filled with information for the scholar to glean. This was just not the right time for me to read it.
So now, I was faced with a choice of what to read next. Since we are in quarantine here in Plainview, the public library is closed. That means I actually wanted to return to My Library Shelf project this week and could not. Since I had just put away a biography, I decided to pick up another one from my TBR and began reading Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush by Jon Meacham. While I am not a historian, I do enjoy reading about our nation’s Presidents and the First Wives. I had a wonderful experience late last year reading a Betty Ford biography that I highly recommend. I’m only about 100 pages into Meacham’s biography and I am enthralled with the Bush story. At this point, George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, have moved to Midland, Texas to begin pursuing work in the oil industry. Their family now includes George, Jr. and Jeb; the last chapter I read was about the tragic death of their daughter, Robin, who died at the age of four from leukemia. It truly was a heart-wrenching tale that I had never heard before.
The biography clocks in at just over 600 pages. That’s a fairly large book for me. However, given my current reading rate at the moment, I am hoping to plow through the work in the coming week and then return to the story of the Clifton family for the second installment of the series.
Reading for Me 
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