An early night is good for the heart...

I just had a wonderful evening. My book club threw a barbeque in a nearby park and we had a great time. I got to do some grillin', we played bocce and chatted it up until 9 when it was too dark to see out. Hopefully Beth got some good pictures and I can post to that as a visual record. Also, Carley pointed me to this wonderful website called www.goodreads.com, and I just spent 2 hours detailing all the different books I read in the first 30 years of my life.

What was slightly jarring about the experience wasn't how easy it was to rattle some book names off, but rather the many books I've read and cannot remember the name of the book or the author. This really bothers me for some reason; it's as if I didn't read the book carefully enough. I guess it says something interesting about reading. You see, goodreads makes an interesting assumption: once you've read something, you'll never forget it and you'll always have the same opinion of it. Example, I remember reading Greenwitch by Susan Cooper, but I scarcely recall many of the elements of the book, and only because of the context of the book in the series (which I highly recommend). I also recall it as being the weakest of the books in the series, and now I feel bad about it because I remember it with this negative mark but with none of the details of why I disliked it so much.

I think the other thing that bothered me was that on the list I could mark off 129 books at first sitting, but at first sitting at netflix I could mark off 500 movies. I may have read at least another 100 books, and I have seen over 1000 movies. I guess if you multiply out the time dedication it evens out, but it's still a little disturbing. I'll have to read more.

I'm also looking forward to writing a lot more reviews, now that I have a list of books to refer to in order to review. After my games night tomorrow, I'll be reviewing quite a few. I think there was another website I was doing this with a while back, and I'll have to refer to that as well.