Sunday Salon: April 4, 2010.

It seems like 2010 is flying by! It is hard to believe that the year is already a fourth over (depressing? yes), but there are great things yet to come.

In reading news...

I wanted to wrap-up a few things from March. I managed to read 11 books during the month, which is a number I have been pushing for. It is definitely an amount I used to hit every month and it has taken a lot of effort to get back there. The titles I finished were:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
3. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
5. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
6. The Misanthrope by Moleire
7. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov
8. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

It was a great reading month and I read some phenomenal titles. I was glad to dive into the Sherlock Holmes stories and I hope to get through all 9 titles by June (perhaps that is wishful thinking). I also managed to read a few plays to balance out all the heavy titles I have been reading, as well as get through one chunkster for the Chunkster challenge, bringing me up to 3 completed (I'm aiming for 12).

With the 11 books I completed this month, my grand total for the year is 23. It puts me off pace for hitting 100 by 2, but that is still doable. I can make it people!

This coming month I am hoping to get through a similar amount of titles. Again, I am going to mix it up a bit and try to get in some more plays, as well as some new authors. Besides Doyle and Shakespeare, I am launching into my second exposure of another author-Dostoevsky! I read Crime and Punishment way back in September as my second book. I was going to wait to tackle another book by him, but it has been 6 months and an opportunity presented itself! I am participating in a read along hosted by Dolce Bellezza of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I think I got through Crime and Punishment so easily by myself since it was my second book and I had a lot of excitement built up about this process. Now I am staring at Dostoevsky and having heart palpitations, so perhaps this process will help. Like the other participants, I will be reading one of the four sections per week and posting my thoughts on each Thursday of this month (April 8, 15, 22 and 29). That will be different from my usual process, but change is good.

So on Thursdays this month expect Dostoevsky in addition to my Thursday Treat posts.

I am also going to try and wrap-up the LOST challenge to give myself some breathing room. I am still stuck on the four novels left on my list (Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heart of Darkness, and The Turn of the Screw). I have to pick 2, but perhaps I'll just finish all of them and be an overachiever (we'll see).

I also have to get through The Count of Monte Cristo and another Dumas (The Three Musketeers or The Man in the Iron Mask) by the 23rd for the Classics Circuit.

See? April is going to be an extremely busy month for me! Anyway, I hope you all have a great reading week!