End of March reading update

So it's April 1st and I haven't played a trick on anyone or told a joke all day. The babies are a little young for jokes, I guess. We laugh a lot all day long, but just at life in general -- pictures of bees in books, or Whiskers sunning herself on a window ledge, or the joyful experience of climbing in and out of cribs.

Speaking of bees, "bee" seems to be their word for any sort of insect now. We're starting to have cockroaches again -- not the horrible infestation we had last year -- we hope -- but the occasional visitor. Today the babies found one in the family room and pointed it out to me: "Bee! Bee!" So I dealt with it in our usual manner, scooping it up with the broom and dustpan and then throwing it outside (you don't want them inside in the garbage -- even dead ones attract friends and relations). However, we have doves nesting right outside the front door and we don't like to disturb them, so I threw it in the backyard instead, and the babies saw where I threw it. A moment later here's Baby A back in the kitchen saying "Bee!" and guess what, he's got the cockroach in his hand, squished. "Oh, thank you," I said, getting the broom and dustpan again and throwing the now-dead cockroach in the backyard again. "OK, come on in now, it's time for lunch!"

So, how did my reading go in March? Not well, not well. I read only six books and that was a struggle. Here is the list:

21. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Some of the people I did NaNoWriMo with last November were very into scifi/fantasy and these were two authors they recommended, so I read the book they wrote together. It was enjoyable, but long. I'm just not a scifi/fantasy person and that's all there is to it.
22. Winter Child by Margaret Maron. A mystery, my basic filler book.
23. The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde. This series (Thursday Next) is getting worse book by book. I'm going to read one more to see if it gets any better. (Oh who am I kidding, I'm sure I'll read the whole series, complaining all the way.)
24. Hard Row by Margaret Maron. Another mystery.
25. Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Lisa M. Ross. This used up a lot of my time as I plodded through it, but I thought it was worthwhile. A parenting book based on Waldorf principles. Don't let your kids drown in toys, keep them away from TV until they're 7, set up schedules, observe rituals, don't involve them in your adult troubles -- stuff like that.
26. The Cleaner by Brett Battles. Mr. Battles is a former Ridgecrestian who spoke to the Ridge Writers group last month, so I had to read one of his books. It was a thriller, and though it was reasonably well written, the main character seemed completely unbelievable, so the book didn't work for me. I'm not going to look for the other books in the series. However, Mr. Battles has a new book coming out that is partly set in Ridgecrest -- that one I'm going to look for.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at the list of books I read in 1981, the only year in my life I managed to read 100 books, to see how many mysteries there were. It's a little hard to count because some of the titles don't mean anything to me anymore, but my best guess is 21. That means I read 79 non-mysteries in one year. Also, 5 of the mysteries were by Dashiell Hammett! That's practically like reading Shakespeare! I was an undergraduate at the time, so the books on the list include class readings: Morphology of the Folktale by V. Propp, The Prince by Machiavelli, and -- get this -- the Aeneid, by Virgil (obviously not in the original Latin). I read the Aeneid???? And, not for school, I read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte for the first time.

Of course, I didn't have two-year-old twins then.