Summer Reading

I feel like I did more reading in the three weeks that I spent in the UK than I did in the four months preceding the trip. Spending hours and hours (and hours) in airplanes and airports helped, as did the fact that we often had a good chunk of down time in the evenings when I could flip on the light above my hostel bunk or at the side of my bed and read a few chapters of whatever book I was on. I brought three mostly-untouched books in my luggage, and was surprised to find myself finished and without reading material by the time we hit Stratford-upon-Avon, Stratford, in spite of being the birthplace of William Shakespeare, seemed remarkably devoid of open bookshops, so I acquired my fourth book in Oxford, blew through it on the plane back from London, and found myself yet again without reading material on a four-hour layover in the Philadelphia airport.

Nine hours of reading on a flight is a lot, though, and I have to confess that I have spent a grand total of about 15 minutes reading for fun since I got home. I'm feeling ready to start up again, but I also have some catching up to do on my book review blog. I like posting two at a time, so today I'm posting the first and most British of my UK reads, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, as well as a pre-UK read I never got around to posting but that is appropriately British nonetheless, Maskerade by Terry Pratchett. Fun fact!: I wrote the Thomas Hardy review in my journal on the ferry from Ireland to Scotland, and have preserved it almost word-for-word on this blog, very little revising.