Decisions, Decisions

I’m kinda mired in three 400+ page books:

   The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

   The Founding of Christendom

   The Importance of Living

All three interest me. All three will be important to digest, I feel. I’ve invested a little over 20 hours and have traveled just about 300 pages into them.

Problem is, I’m feeling a burning, eczemic itch to read some fiction.

My plan was to finish these three, then go on to investigate

   Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, in the second half of September

   The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub, in October

   Edwin Drood, also by Charles Dickens, in November, around Thanksgiving.

With a possible sci fi paperback thrown into the mix. Have a bunch of them on deck and not sure which it will be. Something’ll jump off the shelf at me when the time comes.

I want to revisit Dickens because, well, I enjoy Dickens. I’ve sort of stumbled into a thing where I read a Dickens every Thanksgiving or so, but right now I have two staring out at me. And the King / Straub book will be my creepy Halloween reading. I did read it once, way back in High School in the 80s, but I don’t remember a thing about it other than I liked it so much I gave it as a gift to an office co-worker of whom I was quite fond.

Now, I can abandon all three, but I don’t like “orphaning” books. What I’ll probably do is go full steam ahead of the one I’m farthest into (The Importance of Living, a translated 1937 Chinese classic), then move on to Hard Times and continue through the Tolkien book. I find reading a fiction and a nonfiction simultaneously works best for me and keeps me from hopping about. And the Christendom book, hmm, perhaps I can finish that up around Christmas time. That seems appropriate.

Ah, decisions, decisions.