Summer Reading Update

I finished reading Faking It by Jennifer Crusie this weekend. It was really good - great character development, the plot line was interesting, and I was happily surprised by the ending. A lot of the time, once the major story lines have been wrapped up and the heroine has her hero, the last fifty pages or so are basically filler. This book managed to keep me interested and guessing until the very end. Good stuff. I started Welcome to Temptation this morning. I wish I had read Temptation first, since they have overlapping characters and it looks like Temptation is first, chronologically. But, since there seem to be no overlapping plot lines, I think it's ok.

Someone told me about something that I wanted to add to my summer reading list. I don't remember what it was. hmmm...

Summer Reading

I finally finished my paper. As it turns out, I'm an idiot. I recently switched to Mac and use Word for Mac. Word for Mac is not the same as Word for Microsoft. It is compatible, which is super, but it just looks a little different. Well, it turns out that when I thought I was double-spacing my paper, I was actually setting it at 1.5. Which isn't double. So, I wasn't as far behind as I thought. Whoops. It still wasn't the best thing I've ever written, but it would have had to grow by 5-7 pages to grow at all. So, it was little short and probably could have used more editing, but it is done and now I am free to read at my leisure.

I haven't had time to read a book for fun since Christmas. Here is what I'm planning to read, in no particular order, in the next 5 weeks before school starts.

1. Faking It by Jennifer Crusie
2. All U Can Eat by Emma Holly
3. Lady Anne's Dangerous Man by Jeanne Westin
4. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie
5. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
6. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
7. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor
8. Mohawk by Richard Russo

Clearly, my class on romance novels has inspired me. I loved Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie so much, I bought a bunch of her other books (including one that I've already read, though I didn't know that at the time). I want to read The 7 Habits because I think I could be more effective in my life, and I use the Franklin-Covey system so... It seems to make sense. My boss also lent me that one on CD, so I can listen to it in the car and read it - sort of a double whammy to hope it sinks in a little.

It's kind of a lot, but I think I can manage. I started Mohawk just after Christmas and didn't get very far before school started. The romances generally read pretty quickly. I'll keep you posted.

Meh

I was up late last night, reading this blog. I was supposed to be working on my paper, and I did a little. But then I made the mistake of checking out some of my friends' blogs and found a link to that and I was hooked. Then, I forced myself to get back to the paper, thought I was doing pretty good, discovered I wasn't and went to bed.

So now I have no paper, am ridiculously late, actually, with that paper, and I'm tired.

Apparently, when I'm tired, I crave cookies.

Which made me think of this:

I Am a Bad Student

It is currently 11pm, and my paper for my summer class is nearly a week overdue. If I get it to my professor tomorrow (early) he can grade it in time to turn in my grade to the school. If not, I get an incomplete for the class and he grades it when he can, and I don't know when that will be.

I have no excuses. I loved this class - summer class in Romance Fiction? Come on. It doesn't get much better than that. I like the book I'm writing on - Julia Quinn's "The Viscount Who Loved Me," but I am just not that inspired to write. I feel like everything I'm saying right now (in my paper) is trite and basically at a sub-par undergraduate level. I'm supposed to know stuff now. I'm supposed to be able to come up with a theory and find evidence in the text and it just isn't happening.

But I'm running out of time and I have to get it done. I was doing so well and then, I made the mistake of reformatting.

See, I write my papers single-spaced and in the default font. Then, when I'm done (or stuck and think I have enough for the minimum page requirement) I reformat, slap on a concluding paragraph to tie everything up in a nice bow and call it a day. I didn't think this paper was "done" but I did think it was long enough. Um... No. I'm barely halfway to the minimum length and I ALREADY feel like I'm repeating myself.

So, it's back to my secondary sources to see if there is some more stuff I can throw in this paper.

I'm so disappointed in myself.

I Have Great Timing

I'm going to Atlanta on the 10th of August to meet my new nephew. I planned the trip so that I hit both my younger brother and my mom's birthdays. My parents are throwing a party that weekend, which they have deemed 60/60/20 - they both turned 60 this year and are celebrating their 20th anniversary. So, it was good timing.

Except that we have tickets to the Sox game on the 11th.


And it's Elvis night.

And the first meeting of my new book club is Saturday afternoon.


And Super Diamond is playing the House of Blues on the 12th.


Dammitt! I love the Sox, and we only had tickets to four games this season (one of which is tonight, yay!). So, that's a bummer because I love baseball games, and I hate to miss out. I have loved Elvis since... I can't actually remember when my love began, but I love him. I went to Graceland a few years ago, and the best Valentine's Day gift I ever got was a Vermont Teddy Bear dressed like Elvis. Super Diamond, if you don't know, is a Neil Diamond cover band. Don't laugh. They're AWESOME. It was one of the first concerts that Boyfriend and I went to together, and it has sort of become an annual event - we even went to see them when our Vegas vacation coincided with Super Diamond's schedule. I swear, that one wasn't intentional. I was really excited about my new book club, which was inspired by the recent class I took in popular romance fiction. It has been a long time since I was in a book club and, being in school, I rarely get to read for fun. I'll still read the book, of course, but I was really looking forward to talking about it.

Meeting my nephew is worth missing these things but... I really wish I do all of these things.