I must admit to using my recreational reading as a carrot to encourage me to do work, alternating academic reading (divided into manageable chunks) with New Yorkers, novels, comics. This does not always yield the most efficient results, but it is highly satisfying. I have also developed a curious relay* method to organize my reading and guarantee that I don't favor any particular genre (reading nothing, as is sometimes my wont, but young adult novels). I read three books at any one time, going through a generic to-do list in the following order:

1) Book groups (I now belong, on Yahoo groups, to a Dickens group, a British Classics group, a Literary fiction group, and a Twentieth Century Writers group)
2) Young adult, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime, or Thriller
3) Book from the 1001 Books I must Read Before I Die list **
4) Comics/Graphic novels
5) Random fiction
6) Nonfiction
7) Drama

As a result, I am currently at work on two other books in addition to "The Mayor of Casterbridge:" Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy," which has delighted me by referencing my favorite Poe character (William Wilson), and James McClure's "The Artful Egg." I will leave you with the pleasing (and then troubling, which makes it all the more pleasing) opening line of McClure's mystery:

"A hen is an egg's way of making another egg."




*My mind is on relays at the moment, since I just turned on the television to record the Carolina women's basketball and soccer games and discovered that Animal Planet is televising a delightful sport which sends a series of dogs over hurdles to a machine which shoots tennis balls into their mouths. Nothing (except lumber sports and a curious hybrid of kickboxing and wrestling that I like to call boxling) amuses me quite as much as dog sports.

**I should note that I have another newfound enthusiasm for a webpage called Lists of Bests, which allows you to create or adopt lists (of books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, people to meet, or anything else really) any track your progress through them. Here is the absurd group of lists I am ... pursuing.