Just touching base...

After re-reading my January post on La Morte d'Arthur I can still detect the excitement I felt in planning to read that gigantic work.  I can also smell my naivete wafting off me like roadkill.  My eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach in this case. The stories are unusual and fascinating but they are also short and redundant like reading all of Aesop's fables and Grimm's fairy tales in a single read-through.  Don't get me wrong, I actually like the book and how it reads, I just cant do much of it at a time.  What it basically comes down to is that I have had to take breaks from reading it and I am still not nearly finished.  In between "takes" I have squeezed in some sci-fi books and even began another classic.  So,  I have decided to make this a long-term project that I hope to have finished by the end of Summer  (hopefully long before that). In regards to the other classic I'm reading; In my complete ineptitude I allowed myself to randomly pick my next classic off the shelf, not even attempting to adhere to my impromptu book-list from January, and guess what my finger chanced upon?  Swann's Way by Marcel Proust was my choice of folly, and by playing the stoic rather than declaring a mulligan as a wiser man would do, I have chosen to escape one difficult book by choosing another famously mind-numbing one. At least it was, coincidentally, already on the list.  I am hoping that by comparison, La Morte d'Arthur will read like an intense, action packed beach book.  As far as Swann;s Way goes, it slowly becomes more interesting about the 50% mark, but that should not be difficult do do because the first 250 pages essentially describes the countryside surrounding the home of the main character in florid detail and at least 25% of that is dedicated exclusively to describing flowers and sunbeams in a similar fashion. Nevertheless, I hope the remainder of the book will have some value to me as I plan to push through to the end.  I have decided to go ahead and do my author introductory as usual and you can look for that soon.
Thanks, Joe