On the up side of having to cut back a little on my crafting time, though the hand brace does seem to help a little, I have been reading for pleasure a little more lately. I feel I have to qualify this statement with “for pleasure” because I read all the time, every day, but most often it is for school, which means students’ essays or textbooks.

Though I tend to be a one book at a time reader because I don’t read very fast and worry that I will put too much on myself, right now I’m going back and forth between two books, a biography and a novel.

The biography is a whooper, around 700 pages, which is why I finally picked up another novel. Though I am finding this biography really interesting, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Modern Library Paperbacks), my favorite genre is fiction, so I decided to allow myself the indulgence of reading fiction now and then as a break from biography.

The other book, The Help, has got my “thumbs up” so far, which is saying a lot for contemporary fiction. So much of it I can barely get through after reading the first few pages or first chapter. I guess it must be in vogue now because it seems a lot of novels recently are tackling the multiple point of view where more than one character narrates. This is really hard to do well, but so far, I think the author is pulling it off.