Back and still reading

It's been far too long since I last posted anything here. I had an excuse for a while this month- my computer's hard-drive completely died at the beginning of March, so I'm using my mom's Chromebook now, not a great computer for book blogging, but better than nothing by far. Still, after spending a few weeks just 'liking' other people's posts and lurking, it is high time I write something again.

I've been keeping up my reading still towards reading my local branch library, and I'm just about done with the first shelf. I have checked out all the books from that shelf that I haven't read yet, so once I read and return the ones I have, I will have checked off shelf # 1 of the adult fiction section as READ. Over the past week the library culled a lot of the books on their shelves, which I am not thrilled about, but I am guessing that they sent books over to the 2 new branch libraries that opened recently in town. From what is left on the shelves, I will be done with shelf 2 in just 8 more books. At this rate I may be reading the books in the next letter of the alphabet- books by authors starting with B- in about 2 months. Actually if I only read library books, it would go even faster, but there are too many other great books around.

I've read a total of 88 books so far this year, a record for me for this early in the year for sure. Being stuck without Internet for 3 weeks in January and without a computer for over a week this month helped a lot, since I had little else to do but read for almost a month total. I joined my mom's knitting circle this past week, though, and soon I'll be doing a lot more yardwork, all of which cuts into my reading time. Right now I am finishing the brim on the hat I was making during the knitting circle (2 colors, spiral design, working both colors continuously starting from the center). The pattern actually has no brim, but it's my hat, and I like having a brim to fold over, so I've added a few rows. I may take a picture of it and the matching scarf once they are finished and show them off on here in their own post.

I'm also working on my novel, a beastly critter that is supposed to be sort of dystopian sci-fi, set in a world like ours, but after a planet-wide gender-based civil war in which women went to war to restore their full human rights. The natural tendency of war is to have a life of its own and to create its own suite of atrocities and unforgivable acts, and in the aftermath, women have won their war and have set up a society that restricts men quite severely, using a technology that involves neural linked implanted chips. The story is supposed to be sci-fi and exploring how such a society works, but every so often romantic elements creep in, a predictable enough problem considering the gender basis of the whole setting, but I emphatically am not writing a romance. So I am writing and rewriting my novel, a few pages at a time, weeding out the overly romance-like elements as they pop up, and I'm sure my reading rate will reflect how well my own writing is progressing for a while now.

I hope you are all reading some great books and, if you are working on reading your local library, I hope that you, too, are getting closer to checking off your first shelf of your library as done.

Happy Reading!

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