Books and other matters

Yes, I'll admit it - I'm reading the latest "Oprah's Book Club" selection, "Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett. But the fact is, I've read it before, and I'm mainly doing so because I just finished reading "World Without End", Follett's highly anticipated sequel to "Pillars". Both of these books are mammoth tomes of nearly 1000 pages, but this is the time of year that I like to curl up with just such big, long books that take months to read. It's always nice to spend those long, cold winter nights with the same cast of characters and to depart from their world in the spring time when the weather breaks, only to start a new book, set in a different place and time.

There are so many good books out there to read and it seems like I just can't read fast enough to get them all in. My eyesight isn't the best anymore, either, and I wear trifocals to boot that are currently out-of-date and too weak, but I can't afford the $300 to replace them at the moment, not with Christmas just having passed. My finances are going to need time to recover before I can sink that kind of money into trifocal lenses, not something I can make payments on like a hospital bill. Speaking of which, since it's a new year, that means that my health insurance deductible of $1000 is back in force again for the new calendar year, so I've got to take care not to get hurt or to end up in the hospital for any reason.

Gawd, it'd be so easy for me to go off on a health care rant at this point, but I started out by talking about a book I'm reading, so....I suppose I ought to stay "on-topic" instead of wandering off into some tangent. Well, as I said, so many good books out there. This time last year, I was enmeshed in a project to read some Pulitzer Prize winners for Fiction, and the ones I did read were outstanding. "March" by Geraldine Brooks, "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson and "The Known World" by Edward Jones were the books I selected to read for the winter, all of which greatly impressed me. I also read a very beautiful and sad novel called "On Agate Hill" by Lee Smith that got me very much interested in reading more Appalachian writers.

Well, maybe when I retire, I can finally catch up to all those good books I'm missing now, but I've got a great book to curl up with for the rest of the winter months, and then some good selections for spring and summer as well, so I'm not going to be hurting for reading material any time soon. As the old saying goes, "So many books, so little time......" Boy, isn't that the truth!