#HSreadathon -- summing it all up

While I didn't post any status updates for this read-a-thon, the first four days were running concurrently with the Wicked Wildfire Read-a-Thon, so my updates applied here as well. I'm counting this a successful read-a-thon. I read a total fo 567 pages, finishing two books during the week: Heavenly Pleasures by Kerry Greenwood and Charlotte Tweed and the School for Orphaned Dragons by Allegra Skye. I also read portions of 3 other books and listened to 2 hours of an audio book.

Almost all of my reading was of electronic books. My primary reader is a Kindle. But, when I borrow eBooks from my public library through the Freading service, I can only get them in ePub format, which is not supported by the Kindle. That's when I turn to the BeBook reader. Heavenly Pleasures was borrowed from the library. I started reading it before the read-a-thon began and it was the first book I completed this week. This is the second in Greenwood's cozy mystery series set in a bakery in Melbourne. I definitely enjoyed it and have already checked out the next in the series, and read the first 13 pages of Devil's Food.

I then thrashed around a bit trying to decide what to read next. I read a couple of pages of U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton—the only "paper" book I read all week—before settling down to finish a book I had started in June. Charlotte Tweed and the School for Orphaned Dragons is a freebie I picked up from Amazon in early June. I had read about one third of it and then set it aside for a while. For the read-a-thon, I resumed reading and finished the book. It was a pretty good story and I would have given it fairly high marks if the author had finished it before publication. But, she didn't. The story just stops, having come to no resolution at all. Supposedly there's a sequel, but I don't know when it will be released.

Over the weekend, I listened to a couple of hours of The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester. This is the story of William Smith, the father of English geology. Smith developed the theory of stratification and was one of the first to recognize that the fossils in rocks could identify the time period when the rocks were formed. There's a map, too, as the title says. It measured 6 feet by 8.5 feet, and was colored entirely by hand. I'm thoroughly enjoying this recording, read by the author himself.

Lastly, I've settled down to reading Torch of Freedom by David Weber and Eric Flint. It's grand science fiction set in the universe of Honor Harrington. One of my reading goals this year is to complete the multiple series of books in the "Honorverse".

The Books