Friday 8 January 2016

Bout of Books 15: Friday

Bout of Books

OH HAI LOVELY READERS!  Another day, another frenzy of reading... hopefully, anyway.  I had a better night's sleep last night than I've had in WEEKS (more comfortable, the heating didn't come on and fry me in the night, the cat left me alone), and I've got a fast-paced thriller to return to, so... what are we waiting for?!


~ FRIDAY ~

Books I've read from:  Zoo by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
Pages read today:  119
Books finished today:  None
Running total:  2 books; 558 pages 
The menu: Blueberry muffin, mixed tinned fruit and coffee; buttered toasted teacakes; apple; cheese and bacon quiche with peas and sweetcorn; Terry's chocolate minis
Today #insixwords:  Reading sprint increases page count beautifully.

1pm:  Another laptop-free morning in which I read over breakfast, kept going for a while, then had a nice hot shower before heading downstairs to make lunch.  Now I've got a couple of hot buttered toasted teacakes, an apple and a big mug of coffee, and I think I'm going to play a little game of 'see how many pages I can read in an hour'.  The font in this novel is quite big, and the pace quite quick, so I wonder if I'll improve on my average 28-35 pages an hour (which I know from a fair few Dewey's readathon stat updates, haha)?

 

2:30pm:  Well, whaddya know, I managed to sail in at around 55 pages read in that hour!  And that includes occasional pauses because I was eating teacakes at the same time.  The book is nearly 500 pages long so it's unlikely that I'll finish it today even with the best of intentions, but I enjoyed that little sprint - and it's heartening to know that I can read at a decent clip, with the right book and the right conditions!

Things are getting a bit exciting in Zoo, it's all quite intriguing.  Our hero, a young biologist called Oz, has flown out to Botswana to document aberrant behaviour in the local lion population as part of his theory that some environmental shift is occurring that is pitting animals and humans against each other in increasingly brutal ways.  Naturally, when he gets there, the shit royally hits the fan as he and his guide reach a safari camp to find the place all but deserted and reports of bizarre lion behaviour in the immediate vicinity.  Ooooooooh...

 
 
9pm: Or at any rate, it WOULD have been good if I hadn't pissed away the rest of the afternoon playing on the internet.  Well, playing was part of it.  I used to play Bust-a-Moves on my old Playstation as a kid and now I've found Puzzle Bobble, the online version, and it's so easy to play 'just one more game'...  But I'm also doing a bit of a blitz of everything on my laptop/online at the moment, while I have some free time, so I also spent a couple of hours sorting through bookmarked sites and starting to deal with my picture files, both of which are overflowing.  Not reading, but necessary!  I've read enough today anyway, so I'm happy with that.  :)