Reading wrapup

According to my Goodreads reading challenge tracker, I’m two books off pace to make my goal of reading 75 books in 2013. I hit the ground running in January and was four books ahead of schedule at one point. Then illness hit our house, then vacation (not the book-toting variety of my pre-parenting days, either!), then a reading rut.

I recovered a bit with two good books (“Code Name Verity” and “A Shot of Sultry“), but I’m stuck again with “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr. I’m only 50 or so pages in, and neither the characters nor the story are really hooking me and making me make time for reading.

That’s how I have to function as a reader with such a busy lifestyle. I choose books that suck me in and make me rush through household chores, stay up late and ignore my screwing-around-on-the-Internet tendencies in favor of being thrown into a world far from my own.

“The Alienist” isn’t cutting it so far, but while I’m mildly intrigued and not at all interested in quitting, I might table it for later in the year when I don’t need pulled from a reading rut.

On my shelf from the library awaits, “Out of the Easy,” by Ruta Sepetys and “The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer,” by Michelle Hodkin. Off my personal shelves, I have “The Great Gatsby” (I haven’t read it since high school and don’t remember much beyond “I liked it a lot.”), “The Glass Castle,” and “Gone With The Wind,” which I’ve never read or seen the movie. Please don’t banish me north of the Mason-Dixon Line for admitting this!

***

Now that Toby, Eleanor and Callista are in toddler beds, I’ve started reading to them before bed each night. I feel like a boob admitting that we haven’t done bedtime stories until now, but the semantics were just a total pain in the bum. Please trust me without me going through all the ways we tried and failed.

Instead, we’ve always read through the whole day. We read as a group, we read one-on-one, they “read” by themselves – rest assured my children are read to often – just not at bedtime until recently.

ANYHOW.

Designated reading time has made it much easier to regularly introduce new stories, so we’ve been tearing through our library piles.

My trio’s two newest favorite books are “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site,” “Little Blue Truck,” and the standards we can’t go to bed without are “The Going to Bed Book,” “I Love You Through and Through,” “Goodnight Moon,” and “You Are My Sunshine,” – all of which Toby, Eleanor and Callista have memorized from cover to cover and read aloud with me. It’s nothing short of adorable.

***

What we’re waiting for from the library: