I don't know what has been wrong with me this year. You would think that with so much stay-at-home time, I would have had plenty of time to indulge myself in reading. The reality is that I read one book all the way through - ONE BOOK. And that was a children's book (The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis).
I had started A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley at the beginning of the year, but returned it to the library when the pandemic struck, since there was no guarantee of when I would be able to get it back. And I've been picking at Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser for the past couple of months, but I recently decided I'm going to put it in "hibernation," as a Facebook acquaintance said she does. And that's it. Unfortunately, I haven't even felt like I wanted to read, which is kind of odd - you might think I would want to escape to some fictional world with problems that could be resolved at the end of the plot, unlike the real-world problems we were all facing.
That's not to say I've been an intellectual blob these months. I decided to get serious about studying Spanish. I've been doing lessons on Duolingo for 329 consecutive days. I still have trouble understanding spoken Spanish, but I'm steadily getting better at reading, and I've tried to write some.
I've also become a faithful reader of the Facebook posts by Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor who is writing what she calls "Letters from an American" that summarize the day's events in politics and place them in a historical context. Her speciality is Civil War history, and it is fascinating to see the links between what was going on just prior to the beginning of the war and today's events.
Anyway, I'm going to put Sister Carrie aside (who needs to read about those characters' miserable lives??) and get a fresh start tomorrow. Maybe 2021 will be better, all the way around.
