Happy new week, y’all!  Sorry this post is a bit late this morning – I just got home from Peanut’s three year well-child checkup and now I’m checking in here quickly before I get ready to head to WORK(!)… Gulp.  I’m not officially back from maternity leave, but I’m going in for a couple of hours this afternoon to help on a discrete project for which I have a lot of institutional knowledge.  I’m glad that I’ll be able to help out, and it should be a good test run for tearing myself away from Nugget, which I’m already dreading.

This was a surprisingly productive… and just surprising… reading week for me.  The surprisingly productive part: despite all the hoopla that goes with hosting out of town family and throwing a three-year-old birthday pool party, both of which I did this week, I also managed to finish two books: Breakfast with Buddha and Love and Freindship (Jane Austen’s juvenilia, which I read for Austen in August – thoughts on that to come on Friday).  Breakfast with Buddha was good, but I’m not sure it was quite compelling enough for me to seek out the subsequent novels the author has written featuring the same characters.  We’ll see – I have a long TBR list and it’s getting longer by the day.  Love and Freindship was a lot of fun, so stay tuned for a post about my Austen in August reading.  Now I’ve turned my attention to another Austen in August reading project – Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins.  I’d been wanting to read this history book for awhile, and (without knowing that I was interested in the book – total serendipity, or they just know me really well) my in-laws gifted me a copy.  Thanks, family!  So I’m into that now.  I finished the first chapter – on marriage, in which I learned some neat and surprising facts – and am now into the chapter on pregnancy and childbirth in Jane Austen’s time and HOLY CATS.  I’m glad I live in 2015.  And that I’m done having babies.  My plan is to try to be done with Jane Austen’s England in time to tell you all about it in my Austen in August post, and then I’ll be moving on to The Martian (which I will not have to wrestle away from Steve, as he’s finished – and loved – it).

So, that’s the surprisingly productive – lots of reading and finishing stuff, despite having a full social calendar this week.  And for the surprising part?  Well, you’ll never guess where I went this week.  No, really, you’ll never guess, so I’m just going to tell you.  I went to… wait for it… THE COMICS SHOP.  Yeah, so remember how I said that comics just didn’t really hold any appeal for me?  Well, I kept hearing about Lumberjanes and the premise did sound pretty cool.  (Kids at a summer camp for hardcore lady-types solving anagrams and wailing on monsters sound good to you too?)  Well, after about the umpteenth time that I heard how great Lumberjanes was, I finally decided that the only way to really know if I’d like it was to go look at it.  So one afternoon last week I loaded Nugget in the car and we drove over to Queen City Books to take a peek.  There’s a whole post coming about this – in January, because I sat down and planned out my posts and I have the rest of the year pretty much covered, crazy, right? – but long story short, I left with a copy of Lumberjanes.  And I read it, and I loved it.  The other material I’d hoped to get from the comics shop was what’s pictured above – bound volumes of several Jane Austen novels in comic form.  (This is something that Marvel did about five years ago, give or take.  I didn’t know exactly how comics shops worked, so I thought there was a chance Queen City Books may have them.  They didn’t, and they encouraged me to buy them online, so I got them from Amazon.)  I just thought that the idea of turning Jane Austen’s work into comic books was so different and neat and weird that I had to see what it was about – and it turns out, it’s really, really fun.  I’ve read the comic version of Pride and Prejudice, and it was just so different from what I usually read.  (More to come on the Austen comics, again, on Friday.)  I don’t know that I’m going to become a hardcore comics reader, but I’m definitely open to reading in different formats, so I’ve been looking at some other graphic novels, and I think I’m going to dig into the comic version of Northanger Abbey next – it does seem really well suited to being a comic book – at least while I wait for the next trade paperback issue of Lumberjanes to come out in October.  Anyway, expect a post on this in a few months, and hopefully I’ll have more cool stuff to report then.

Wow, so much for a quick check-in, huh?  So, how about you – what are you reading this week?