April.

I thought about things I could blog about a lot this month. But didn't actually write any of them. 

I did do some reading though.

• For Whom the Bell Tolls     (Ernest Hemingway)     

• A Wind in the Door     (Madeleine L'engle)

• Divergent     (Veronica Roth)

• Insurgent     (Veronica Roth)

• Tales From Watership Down     (Richard Adams)

• A Swiftly Tilting Planet     (Madeleine L'engle)

• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail     (Cheryl Strayed)

• Four     (Veronica Roth)

I mentioned in my last post that I often find Hemingway to be a bit of slog. And I felt a little bit like that at the start of For Whom the Bell Tolls. But it turned out to really be great book. It was one of those books that takes a while to read. You can't read it over a weekend, or even over a week. So it lingers and becomes a sort of constant in your life for a while as you slowly work through it. It becomes almost like a friend and then when you finish you are a bit sad that it is done and gone. It reminded me a lot more of A Farewell to Arms than of The Sun also Rises. Which was great because I loved A Farewell to Arms and found The Sun also Rises to be a bit tedious. There was one chapter I didn't particularly enjoy where it explained in detail how a group of fascists were killed by a village mob. But other than that I enjoyed it wholeheartedly. I wasn't expecting to love a book about the Spanish Civil war. But it just grew on me the more I read it. 

I also enjoyed Wild. It reminds me just a bit of Tracks by Robyn Davidson. But probably only because it is also a story about a solo woman doing something big in the wilderness. The more I read about this sort of thing, the more I think I need to backpack alone for three months or walk across a desert myself. I probably won't. But when I read these books it makes me feel like I could.