So Much To Read, So Little Time

Tucson Weather Today

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President Obama delivered his State Of The Union address to Congress and to the citizens of The United States January 24, 2012.

I did not watch it, mainly because such exhibitions in the past have always made me almost physically ill. It is painful for me to sit through all their ridiculous ceremonies and showtime phony posturing by the participants, their families, and the privileged celebrities seated in the audience.

I did not watch the finely-rehearsed and professionally choreographed show -- but I did download an "as prepared" transcript of the speech, and I did read a small part of it. I'll probably read the rest when I get some free time.

But I have nothing to enter into my blog about it... not yet.

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I now have decided that a certain suspicion lurking long, but successfully suppressed: -- "I am not a writer but merely an avid reader and am only a writer-wannabe" is true.

This affirmation came about as I struggled to write (within this week) a short story solicited by my writers group. I fear I will not succeed by the deadline, which is midnight Saturday, January 28, 2012.

That's the day after tomorrow.

There will most probably not be a completed short story forthcoming.

Of course, a great many of my reasoned conclusions in the past have proven to be wrong.

So . . .

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Virginia Woolf born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London January 25,1882 is a much vaunted author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and A Room of One's Own (1929).

(vaunted: boasted about or praised excessively)

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is another famous author whose works I have not read. I seem to remember having read excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway but found that at that time her writing style did not appeal to me.

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Just for fun . . .

My Handsome Nell is perhaps the first poem written at the age of 15 by Robert Burns.

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My son stopped by last Sunday and drove me to a local Bookman's used bookstore where I used my Christmas gift-certificates ($40) to buy some of the 'books I'd been meaning to read' including Ragtime and Welcome To Hard Times, both by E.L. Doctorow, Comanche Moon and Cadillac Jack, both by Larry McMurtry, Hell and The Alleys Of Eden, both by Robert Olen Butler, and finally The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven by Sherman Alexie.

In the vernacular, "Now I've got some serious reading to get done."

(vernacular: The language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region.)

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"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
--Somerset Maugham