Bout of Books 12.0

It is my second time participating in the Bout of Books read-a-thon, hopefully this time around I'll be

more successful. In May my happy, blissful reading streak was interrupted by an unexpected cannonade of life. Why does this keep happening anyway? Can't life understand that reading gets the priority? Ugh. Hopefully, this time I can get life reined in, especially because I have a relatively free week (well... "relatively" being the key word) so I should be able to get some glorious reading time under my belt.

You can sign up here!

About the Bout of Books:

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, May 12th and runs through Sunday, May 18th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure, and the only reading competition is between you and your usual number of books read in a week. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 10 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

My possible TBR:

1. Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier
2. Sapphire Blue by Kerstin Gier
3. Emerald Green by Kerstin Gier

The entirety of the Ruby Red Trilogy comes to 1148 pages, so I think that's good enough for now. Yet if I finish early, I'm inclined to pick up "The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern" by Lilian Jackson Braun, or "Timequake" by Kurt Vonnegut.

Time devoted to reading:

I am off Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, which sounds good; however, I do have to cram some social obligations and work at home in there, as well as studying for the following week, so sadly, it's not as much time as it seems.

My goals:

• Read at least a thousand pages. The TBR above is over 1100 pages, and I'll probably read more anyway.
• Track progress at the end of every day

Updates:

Monday, January 5th

236 pages of "Ruby Red"
Total: 236

Tuesday, January 6th

115 pages of "Ruby Red"+ 40 pages of "Sapphire Blue"= 155 pages
Books finished: "Ruby Red"
Total: 391

Wednesday, January 7th

317 pages of "Sapphire Blue"
Books finished: "Ruby Red", "Sapphire Blue"
Total: 708

Thursday, January 8th

250 pages of "Emerald Green"
Books finished: "Ruby Red", "Sapphire Blue"
Total: 958 

Friday, January 9th

47 pages of "Emerald Green"
Books finished: "Ruby Red", "Sapphire Blue"
Total: 1,005

Saturday, January 10th

152 pages of "Emerald Green", 68 pages of "The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern"
Books finished: "Ruby Red", "Sapphire Blue", "Emerald Green"
Total: 1,225

Sunday, January 11th

117 pages of "A Midsummer's Night Dream" (this page count is a little bit iffy, since it's a play. The 117 pages is my clothbound edition, and that's what I read, but it takes up about 20 pages in my anthology edition of Shakespeare's plays, so that's how the page count is not necessarily solid. But... let's count it, why not)
Books finished: "Ruby Red", "Sapphire Blue", "Emerald Green", "A Midsummer's Night Dream"
Total: 1,342


This was an amazing read-a-thon! Definitely my best Bout of Books experience so far, and the most exciting part of it was the fact that I read some really good books. I never expected to like a YA trilogy so much, I usually try to steer clear of YA with fantasy elements, but the Ruby Red trilogy was SO GOOD. This series became a very big part of my life for a week, and upon finishing it I was feeling befuddled because I missed the characters so much already.
I'm really happy with how this read-a-thon went, and all there is now is to hope that you guys had a similar experience, and that 2015 will be abounding in some more great reading events!

Tangled.

Three years ago I decided to blog daily for a year because I believed it would cure me. Chaos, though it might not seem like a disease, is one of the most serious sicknesses our society has to deal with. For the most part though I don't care too much about society: I observe it, but I rarely want to cure it. Myself, I wanted to get sorted out. Thoughts in my head were often tangled like my hair just after shower and I hoped that through blogging I would gently brush it all off, make it straight and pretty, apply the magical silk conditioner through writing. I might pull more than once and maybe pluck some hair out, but generally it was supposed to make it less perturbed and more put together-looking. This experiment didn't work out - or rather, I have no way of seeing if it would have worked out; I stopped writing after twelve posts. I have no ambitions to go back to blogging this frequently; moreover, I am often terrified at the thought that I'm putting this stuff out publicly, and seriously considering making this blog private. I'm very easily terrified by internet invigilation- type scenarios, and although they sound ludicrous when I vocalize them, they're not that improbable - frighteningly.

What am I doing then? For the first time in my life I don't know. Now the thoughts (and, coincidentally, the hair) are more tangled than they have ever been. I have been being myself for longer now than I have ever before, but so much more repeatedly I feel like I have to become my own self. What I make of myself and take for reality is far from the reality of me for other people, and that to me is like having been writing a story for my entire life, and suddenly, just before publication, when it was finally becoming its true purpose, finding it being set fire to.

Yesterday, I thought about why I don't like to talk to people I like about problems that are important to me. And the answer is this: I have a tendency to blindly follow advice of people I respect. If somebody formative to my world was to give me advice, I would automatically switch off decision making. That it seems to me like I have been doing, yet I'm consciously striving to make an effort to stop it.

When I was a kid I was, for a couple of years, positive that I was the world's best basketball player, as sure as eggs is eggs. This proved to be untrue when I changed schools, and became even more so because my confidence suddenly plummeted. But to this day I get really excited and nervous when I'm about to throw a balled aluminum foil I used as wrapping for my sandwich to a bin across the room. The screams of the excited audience of this feat, if it be successful, can fuel me for the rest of the day, but a failure dispirits me for much longer than appropriate. Because I fear that I'm not living up to be whom I presume (or presumed) myself to be and that makes me lost. And generates much torment I'm usually not equipped to handle. These last sentences were obviously not about trashcan scoring.