First up, some housekeeping: if you’re navigating to my page in your browser (as opposed to in Feedly or reading as a subscription) you may have noticed that the URL has changed. Instead of messybaker.wordpress.com, you can now find me at messy-baker.com. (I think you should be automatically re-routed if you enter the old URL, but this is the first time I’ve changed my internet address in more than ten years of blogging – so bear with me, because I don’t know what I don’t know!) The reason for the change is just that I was sick of seeing ads at the end of my most recent blog post – it may not have been as big of a deal if the ads were at all relevant to my content, but they weren’t, or at least the ones I was seeing weren’t, and some of them were quite off-putting (tape for your athlete’s foot, anyone?). In researching how to make the ads go away, or at least be somewhat related to my content, I found that for $4/month I could upgrade to an ad-free experience for everyone who reads in their browser, and that was totally worth it to me. So the new URL is because I have upgraded to a paid plan and you should no longer see ads on the site. Happy Monday to one and all!

Bit of a slow reading week, but a good one – I’m wondering if the slower reading speed was due to the fact that I spent most of the week over The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, which I started on the way to New York City last weekend and didn’t finish until this Friday. I’ve noticed that I seem to read short stories at a slower pace, often setting the book down between stories to absorb and think about them instead of whipping through page after page. Maybe the answer to my general difficulty with short stories is in not trying to read a volume like a novel – a story a day, read with a longer-form book also on the go, might be a better approach. I have a volume of Agatha Christie short stories on the table to pick up soon, and I’m thinking I’ll try this out: a short story with my coffee every morning, and reading something else in the evenings. Am rather interested to see how the experience will be different.

Anyway, I was reading something else alongside the Wharton stories – still working my way through Horizon, on audible. It took the entire rest of the week, but I finally wrapped it up over the weekend (turning, with relief, back to my podcatcher). In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best place to begin with Barry Lopez. It was massively long and jumped around in both time and geography – really interesting and well-written but I expect not a great introduction to his work. I probably should have started with Arctic Dreams, his most famous work, but I chose Horizon because it has a section on Antarctica. The rest of the weekend’s book time was devoted to Beloved, another one from my Classics Club list and another one that has been on my TBR for ages. I’m almost done and will finish it up today – it’s been an intense read, so I’m planning something a little lighter as a recovery book before I pick up The Color Purple, which is also on my library stack right now.

The Virginia bluebells are at peak right now! We enjoyed a beautiful ramble through the woods on Easter Sunday, checking out the blooms. If you’re local, you probably have a few more days to see them – do try to get there while you can!