There are seven books on the little dresser beside my bed where I keep my socks and panties (and matches and lotion and lip balm, for emergencies). I wish that I could follow with something like, for the seven days of the week, but it's rather more like for the seven sorts of moods I find myself in at the end of every night. I'm more often adding to the collection than I am actually finishing reading anything. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales has been there the longest, with my best cloth bookmark indicating my slow but steady progress. I like to mark the stories I think want retelling; the latest candidate being 'King Thrush-Beard' which, if some feminist hasn't tackled it already, I would happily. When I finish my novels, at least.
The first volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes is there, as well, and I'll be honest and say that my reading is influenced as much by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as it is by my desire to actually have read more than the story I skimmed for an assignment in graduate school (I'm of the belief that graduate school encourages skimming, or at the very least an addiction to caffeine pills).
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's anthology, The Faery Reel: Tales From the Twilight Realm, remains from the night M and I couldn't sleep, and I read aloud 'The Annals of Eelin-Ok.' Our eyes were shining both by the end, my throat sore but lips pulled in a smile at the sight of him. I cannot remember which of my professors, one of the betters ones, surely, said you should always read aloud to the ones that you love. There's something to be said for sharing a story that way, a sweetness from the time of parlors and family bibles, I suppose.
Among the last are two novels loaned and several romps of urban fantasy, which I think I enjoy best when I can clatter forth in heels with leaves crunching underfoot, when the days are short and the nights just long enough to be dangerous. Every October, and I mean every October, I think I want to write about witches. It's the best time to read about them, too.
Summer time is writing time, but I'll entertain these tomes for a few months yet. What are(n't) you reading?