Out on the rolling lawns again

I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about making a summer reading list this year. It is only this close to Memorial Day that I am free to admit that. I suppose I could bend to the local tendency and blame it on the weather; in the past few weeks here, we've moved from highly allergic semi-spring, to April in Seattle (or Atlantis, depending), and then jolted into what looks like summer. Where was the gentle crescendo? At least in Wisconsin we had two weeks, easy, of fresh warm days before the mosquitoes descended. On Saturday I had my bare feet in the Atlantic, and on Sunday I almost dug out my peacoat again.

I mean, it's not as if there's any danger that I won't read anything if I don't sit down and make a list. Last year I only read, I think, three books on my list, but it wasn't because, as a social-studies teacher once told me, my "brain was vegetating." I still read plenty. But I feel as though I have to defensively point that out in case I take up a soul-consuming video game habit in the meantime. Hasn't been a summer like that yet.

In my case I think it's a matter of balance; I'm feeling too regimented in other areas of life, hence the desire to ease off and just kind of read as I go. I'm also interested in the serendipitous ways of following one book into another, so it might be neat, rather than sticking to one list, to note how I end up in the books I end up in, and where the patterns are. (Swear this kind of notation won't take the place of Actual Blogging; I can just tack on an origin, or something.)

What I really want to do is finally tackle 2666, and also read something new in Spanish (suggestions? You know what to do), because I'd like to wake that muscle up for something. I could kill 2 birds and read 2666 in Spanish, but that feature would be better deemed Summer/Fall/Winter/Possibly Spring 2012 Reading, for which I do not have the patience. Yet I have that aspect which thrives on lists and metrics, that asks more, that tells me this is not enough.