Exam time - talk among yourselves, would you?

I'll be a fully fledged sociology bore for just a few more days, after which I'll be launching my Grand Summer Reading Project.

But for now, isn't my clematis beautiful?

Forgot one

I got a new deckchair.
So, a couple of weekends ago, I thought I should honour it by sitting <----- just there and reading 31 A room of one's own, Virginia Woolf at her finest, making you want to go off and write and do fine things and think great thoughts.
My numbering's going all to pot here, and it's such a little book you might argue it should only get a half, but it's so full of so very much to think about that I'm almost inclined to put it down as two.
Again, a reread from years ago but I don't think I understood it before: I think perhaps you need to be a grownup (or at least, closer to being one than you were before).

It's been a while

I think the existence of all this daylight is keeping me away from my computer, a bit, plus I took some photos to put on here but my camera's never by my chair, and, you know, reasons and reasons.
I'm also not reading as much as I'd like to be (I may have said this before). In the last few weeks, there's been a bit more sociology, starting with 26 Storytelling Sociology, edited by Quinney and Berger, I believe, which was a gorgeous anthology of ethnographic writing, of sociology-as-narrative, so mainly autobiographical accounts of personal experiences and how they are created by and respond to the communities around them, this kind of thing. It's made me realise how much I'm enjoying this side of things, so next I read 27 Revision: autoethnographic reflections on life and work, Carolyn Ellis writing up various life experiences and then doing what she calls "meta-autoethnography", writing about the reactions to her work by those described in it. Yes, I suppose in one sense it sounds a bit pretentious but mainly was very readable and has given me a good deal of material for reflection: I've been reading it for 15 minutes with coffee in the mornings just before going in to work, and it's set off some excellent daydreams.
Finally on sociology, I'm on 28 Seven years old in the home environment, which follows on from 21 above, but now I've acquired number four in the series too, so I really will talk about them all when I'm done.
To keep me going on fiction, I had a nostalgic couple of hours with 29 Heidi - yes, I asked myself whether it was right for this to get a number but, you know, it's a book, it's been years since I've read it, and it made me cry, so I thought it would be wrong if it went unmentioned. To make me a more serious person, I now have 30 The Brothers Karamazov on the go. At the moment I'm feeling distressed not to be loving it like I loved Crime and Punishment. Whenever there's a really good passage, or even line, I get all excited and think yay, it's going to be just as good, and then you get several pages of religious or political monologue and I zone out again. This is more like what I thought Russian literature was going to be like, and like I let C&P persuade me it wasn't.

More soon, I need to go on about my lovely garden and my planned (for after exam) Grand Reading Project, which is going to take me all the way through to Booker season.