Catch up

So meal planning Monday totally worked, until last night I was starting the bolognese and sliced my finger open. Once the bleeding had stopped I felt a bit ill so ended up just eating toast and Nutella for tea instead - healthy. Tonight is spaghetti but I think I'll leave the chopping to someone else.

In other news, I finally finished In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. This book, one of my huge stack of library books to plough through, took me bloody ages to read! It was an average length novel, 340 pages, but it only had four chapters. Four chapters is not acceptable for a book of that size. For this reason I found I could only really read it in big chunks of time. 15 minutes here and there was not going to cut it with the mega-chapters.

I struggled to get into it but had heard good things so I persevered. This is not a spoiler, you know from the start there’s been a murder (say it in your best Taggart voice). But the reviews I had read said what compelled them to keep reading was the details - the how and the why. They were right and as I read on I found myself wanting to know all the details too. Especially because they were real and they happened. In the end I really enjoyed it (even though it did give me nightmares!) and I think a lot of that was due to the fact it was based on a true crime.

Stupidly I have since started another crime book, In The Woods. This one hasn't given me nightmares yet.

Kindle guilt

I think today I crossed over to the dark side. I was getting the train to work and I picked up the book I’m currently reading. It’s a massive, hardback beast of a book and it wouldn’t even fit in the bag I took today. And then the bad thought popped into my head. Maybe I should just get it on Kindle instead…

I have a Kindle, I really like it. However, I tend to only use for reading the classics that you can get free (and occasionally some legally-dubious ones that my father-in-law got off a colleague, but let’s not mention them!). For all my other reading needs I go to the library. I’ve spoken about my reasons for this before – no space for books, I don’t reread them, saves money, blah blah - I like my library.

I’ve never swapped an actual book for the electronic version of the same book before. It feels like the first step on a slippery slope which ends with my wrists becoming too weak to hold up normal books and me forgetting how to turn actual pages.

P.S. The book is IQ84 vols 1 & 2 by Haruki Murakami. Zoe recommended another of his books to me and I enjoyed it so much I went straight onto this one without realising the epic proportions!