Alright kids, I know I said this would be my last of these updates, and that I was going to finish She-Wolves this week.  The best-laid plans… It’s been another bear of a week, friends.  I’m still completely swamped and utterly overwhelmed, and I’ve barely even been able to read this week, unless you count legal documents.  I even worked yesterday – a bummer, since the Fourth of July is normally one of my very favorite holidays, but there were things I absolutely needed to get done, and so I powered through.  I’ve tried to at least get through a few pages of “fun reading” each day, but She-Wolves is dense non-fiction and, well, I just haven’t been able to blaze through it like I normally would.  (It’s really good, though.)  Here’s what I’ve done:

• Returned Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity to the library.  I’m just not up for it right now.  I need comfort reading. I’ll try to check it out again at some point in the future, but now’s not the time.  And then there were two.
• Made it about halfway through She-Wolves.  I’ve been completely fascinated by the tales of these extraordinary women: first the Empress Matilda, then Eleanor of Acquitaine, and now Isabella of France.  Reading their stories has informed some of my fiction reading, too: Matilda features (as “Maud”) in the background of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth; Eleanor of Acquitaine features in Sharon Kay Penman’s novels, such as When Christ and His Saints Slept, which I’ve been itching to read; and Isabella of France is a prominent character in The Iron King, which I just read this spring.  So I’m taking my time over this and enjoying it, but I’m not done.

Next week, finally, I think I’m going to get a reprieve.  Since my plans for taking off Friday and having a nice, relaxing four-day weekend went out the window, I might even try to take a “mental health day” or two to relax, hang with Peanut, and catch up on my reading.  This is something I’ve been trying to do since mid-May, so I desperately need to unwind.  I expect that next week will see me finishing up this library stack, so I promise this time: one more update and then I’ll refrain from embarrassing myself any further with library shenanigans… at least for awhile.