The Sunday Salon: Resolution Reading/Slumps

I’ve been reading a lot of posts this week about resolutions and it got me thinking of my own, which happen to be non-existent.  Personally, I like it that way.  It seems, and has been proven over and over again, that if I make resolutions no matter how general and open, I break them.  Not intentionally you understand it’s more a subconscious thing that happens and I manage to talk myself out of and around keeping any and all resolutions.  To break the annoying cycle, in short, I don’t make resolutions anymore.  But, in fact, I did this year.  I just didn’t write them down.  I think this is all an elaborate ruse to fool myself into keeping the very vague things that I’d like to do.

In terms of reading, I don’t have any other than wanting to read more of my own books and more non-fiction.  Those I think I can keep but since I’ve written them down, I’ve probably jinxed myself and even those won’t happen now.

Anyway, onto slumps.  I’ve been sort of in a reading funk this year.  Yes, even nine days in and I’m getting myself slumpy.  How can that be?  I have no answer so if you have one let me know.  Please.  Here’s what happened.  I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I knew it would be a tough book to follow so I picked a book I knew would be completely different — The Tudor Secret by C.W. Gortner.  I’m reviewing the book for The BookReporter so I knew I had to finish it and since it was something all together different, I knew it would be a good place to start.  It was.  The book itself was fine and entertaining as the Tudors and their antics always are.  Then I spent a whole evening trying to figure out what to read next.  I scoured the shelves, checked the library to see if my holds were in, and finally opened the Nook.  That’s when I found The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  It was short and it entertained me.  Then came yesterday when I spent the entire day on the couch feeling under the weather and cranky and all I wanted was a book and couldn’t find one that fit.  Alas, after this very long paragraph, I’ve come to the slump problem.  I didn’t have any books I wanted to read.   I tried The Last Pendragon by Sarah Woodbury hoping that my enduring love of Arthurian legend would pull me through.  It didn’t entirely fail me but it did take me 134 pages to rescue me.

Part of the problem is that I have a book I really, really want to read — A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness — but I’m doing this one for review and it’s not due for several weeks and I promised myself that I would hold off since I have another book due in between.  I’m beginning to think that if I had just read the book instead of putting it on the side; I wouldn’t be in this stupid slump right now.  Ah, oh well.

I noticed that I have several reviews that I never posted thanks to holidays and breaks and me giving myself permission to sleep a little later on some days (which is why Thursday and Friday of last week were quiet here).  So, I’ll be setting up some posts today to catch-up on my backlog which has been patiently waiting for me to get butt in chair.  The next two weeks will be the weeks of reviews here at Just Book Reading.

Happy Sunday everyone.

Advertisement

3 thoughts on “The Sunday Salon: Resolution Reading/Slumps

  1. Ah, I can relate to your resolution-jinx-thing. I did write mine down in a blog post…and already, after the first week, I’ve managed not to keep them. Well, I’ve kept some of them (the ones about reading), but that one about healthy eating and exercise, not so much.

    If I could find a way to combine reading/blogging and exercise, I might be good. I know…reading can be listening while exercising. But I don’t like audio books!

    So what do you think will work?

    Here’s my salon:

    http://accidentalmoments.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-sunday-salon-jan-9/

  2. HP and the Deathly Hallows always does me in. I cry at the end, think that it was over too swiftly and then go back and read an earlier HP book to get myself over it. Since I finished listening to the Deathly Hallows on Friday I started listening to the Half-Blood Prince again to stave off withdrawals. Yes, sadly I am a full-blown HP addict. 🙂

  3. I’m not a New Year’s resolution gal either. 🙂

    Also, I was in a HUGE slump for two weeks following Christmas, into the New Year. It was a bit frustrating, but I knew once I broke through it I’d be reading up a storm. And that’s what happened! 🙂 I’m sure it’ll be the same for you.

    I say go read A Discovery of Witches! If you read the other book first, you’ll probably end up not liking it very much anyway, and then it won’t be as much fun to write a review. lol

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.