Reading Challenge

Well, just how far into my reading challenge am I?  I don't actually know, though I'm going to try to total up the books I've read before the conference starts next Wednesday evening.  I read 18 books at the Lincoln Library today and finished one of T.A. Barron's books in my car as well (The Great Tree of Avalon:  Child of the Dark Prophecy).

I've learned a couple of things about myself as a reader by listening to this book, and also about my car and what my next one will be like.  As a reader, listening to a book on tape reminds me of the strategy of rereading because yes, my mind does occasionally wander when I read and I need to back up and reread.  So you can imagine, while I'm driving, that I'm focused on more than the book at hand!  Mostly I listened to this book on the stretch of interstate between here and work; that's nearly half an hour each way.  But it was frustrating running errands in town or driving to the gym because I kept wanting to find out what was happening in the story, and I knew I shouldn't listen while I was navigating traffic lights and other vehicles!  So I'd have to occasionally back up the cd to 'reread,' and then I finally got smart and stopped listening altogether while I was in town.  As a listener, I found myself wondering about the spelling of words that are new to me, which in this case were primarily names of people / creatures, and places.  It was comforting to remember that I have copy of the book, so I can look up these words and see them spelled eventually rather than just wonder about it forever.

What I learned about my car is that, unlike my last one, this one doesn't let run the cd back; I can skip back to the previous track, but that's it.  That means that if I'm listening to a track of the book and about 2 1/2 minutes into it realize I've missed something, I can't just run it back a tad; I have to skip back to the beginning of the track, which means repeating the entire 2 1/2 minutes to get to the last little bit that I missed.  Not that the wandering actually happened often with this book: it's action packed and full of amazing descriptions of wild, new places.  I've decided Tom Barron just really likes to make things up, and he does an extraordinary job of doing it!