reading is fundamental.

finished world without end. good book. nice long involved story. intriguing setting. but... one of the things i appreciated most about what mr follett did also tended to take up a lot of space. when he switched scenes, he always reminded you who the people were & how they were related to each other. this is very helpful when the cast of characters is large, but it takes up a lot of real estate. well, the way mr follett does it takes up a lot of real estate. also would have liked to have heard more descriptions about living with and around the plague. the months of plague were described in too few pages. caris's work with medicine could have been more deeply explored & explained. it was like mr follett got tired of the creative part of explaining the detail of medicine or cloth making or building - and he just settled for soap opera. not that it's not a good book, because it definitely is a good book, but it's no pillars of the earth.

currently finishing up the dragonkeeper series with dragonlight - the fifth book. it's sort of a relief after the darkness of the mid-1300s to read the more lighthearted fare of kale allerion & her friends. not that they don't have their tense moments - this IS the story of good-vs-evil after all. it's got its apocalyptic elements. but it's rated p-g where world without end definitely gets an r rating.

next after dragonlight - i am contemplating re-reading a tree grows in brooklyn. i read it for summer reading in like 7th grade, and i remember a couple scenes that really impressed me, and i remember enjoying it, so i'd like to go back and revisit it. but, there are so many books i want to read that i wonder about the value of going back and re-reading something. i mean, there are a limited number of books that i can read in this lifetime. maybe i should focus on the ones i haven't read yet. on the other hand, it's not like i'm trying to earn any accelerated reader points. i am reading for pleasure, and if i want to re-read something, then bygod i will! now... do i want to....

speaking of accelerated reader - remember s-r-a? that was like accelerated reader back in the day. it was these boxes of folded over cardstock - folded to like... maybe... 6x9 or something. each card had a story and you'd read the story and then answer questions about it. each box had like... 50 cards - 5 each in 10 sections. you'd work your way through the sections and through the boxes. i loved s-r-a. the neat boxes, the color coding, the progression, the scoring. yeah... s-r-a was the bomb.

gotta go google s-r-a now and see if i can find any sets on ebay or something.