Turkey and stuffing some reading into that spare time

Holidays are a good time for cramming a lot of random reading into various chunks of time. For instance, waiting on the turkey fryer to actually heat up despite the recipes promising 15 minutes gives one enough time to find out what's going to be on sale for Black Friday at just about every store that's ever printed a sales ad. While the turkey's actually cooking for a supposedly 45-minute period much lengthened by the wind blowing the flame, I continued reading how the Connecticut Yankee is getting along on his quest. The high point for these chapters was when the sorceress Morgana had been about to throw him in the dungeon until Sandy identified him as "The Boss". Perhaps he'll be slightly less annoyed with her excessive talking now that it has been useful. Later I had time to read a few websites ironically including an essay on buying local rather than falling for the hype of Black Friday. Particularly interesting were the American Library Association's Banned Books pages the related information I found on why many of the books were banned. Some of the reasoning is laughable until thinking about how it led to censorship and book burnings, then it's just asinine. It's crazy that some people are still so small-minded that they think reading books with swear words or about two male penguins raising a baby together will harm students.

Archie and the Tweets

The latest issue of Life with Archie isn't much like the old digests at all. Each one is divided into two stories that need to be read in one reading break each or preferably together. In contrast, the digests have much shorter stories that can be squeezed into a commercial break. Rather than leaving it unexplained due to being “just a story,” this series is getting into quantum mechanics to explain how Archie is simultaneously married to both Betty and Veronica. It's definitely not something that would have come up in the old issues.

As for most of the rest of my reading time this week, I actually looked at Twitter. It wasn't my goal, but I saw a news article about the “Six-year project to tweet the Second World War" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8877167/Six-year-project-to-tweet-the-Second-World-War.html and checked it out. “WW2 Tweets from 1939” https://twitter.com/#!/RealTimeWWII was actually more interesting than either a book of the same information or a stereotypical Twitter account where people talk about random things that don't matter to anyone but themselves. It was nice that there were links to pictures and videos from the era, usually described as “live” to emphasize the illusion that this was all actually being tweeted realtime from 1939. It was annoying that you have to click on every picture rather than it just being posted inline, but I guess that makes it easier for people to load on their phones without using up their data plan. The information being broken up into short “tweets” with links to break up the reading further made it easier to read over the course of a few breaks. I ended up spending around an hour on this site all together even though I wouldn't have spent that long reading the same information presented differently. As an added bonus, one of the clicks had an ad for Cracked.com's Twitter page, https://twitter.com/#!/cracked to waste a lot of time with. This page is only links to articles that aren't all safe for work or family-friendly, but I read at least another hour's worth of articles like “The 7 Dumbest Things Students Do When Cramming for Exams,“ “17 More Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped” featuring the Kansas City library http://www.snopes.com/photos/architecture/kclibrary.asp#photo which I drove past a lot but never went to since I tutored at a nearby branch.

The Continuing Connecticut Yankee

This week I took advantage of some longer reading breaks while waiting on people to pick up their items from the auction I helped with at a former school. It was surprising just how much more I was able to read in four days of long reading breaks around than 30 minutes each than the usual 6-7 days of 15-20 minute breaks. I might literally have spent half of last week's reading time re-reading to remember what had happened earlier in the chapter I'd left off in the day before.
The story continues with the eclipse having had its desired effect and riches being offered to the former prisoner. He rambles even more about little details before destroying Merlin's tower using science in the guise of magic, takes on the nickname "The Boss", starts secretly effecting change through building factories and simple subversion, finally being pushed into going on a quest. The most amusing ramblings were in the middle of chapter 12 when he realizes he can't take off his own helmet to get to the handkerchief he'd left there, and he's unbearable becoming drenched in sweat in his suit of armor. It went on for several pages like a lot of the other overly-described scenes, but it was too funny for that to get too annoying. He's finally able to be helped out of his armor, has more subversive conversations with the locals, and gets back on the road with traveling companion Sandy, who is meant to be guiding him to his quest but provides him a lot of annoyance with ramblings of her own. It was definitely a lot easier to keep track of how the story was progressing when I had enough time to read at least a chapter at a time. However, I think I'll go back to shorter stories until I have more opportunities to read for longer than 15 minutes uninterrupted.

Checking Out a Free Google Book

Trying out the free Google Books this week, I chose “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain. I didn’t pick it totally at random, but it was the first free book with an author I recognized. So far, it has had its moments and a few funny jabs at the political and religious leadership. Some of the descriptions of the settings are detailed to the point of slowing down the story. The narrator has finally realized that he isn’t dreaming or in an asylum and is planning to use an upcoming solar eclipse to convince his would-be executioners that he is a more-powerful wizard than Merlin. The only trouble I have with reading this in my spare time rather than in a longer chunk of time is that it’s hard to get back into the story the next time I read. Despite reading a few pages whenever I got the chance every day, sometimes it was tough to remember just what had happened on my last reading break and I spent too long checking the pages before to see who was who. I think the story would be better and easier to “get into” if one tried to read it all at once or at least not while waiting on classes and other short breaks like that.