This month has been a bit different. For a guy who has been reading from 4-9 books per month, I’ve only read one this month. What’s up?
1) My wife and I had a vacation to Alaska in the middle of the month. That’s actually when I read the one book I did read.
2) The book I spent most of the month on was Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks… in Italian. So I have spent a lot of time plodding through his work, translating, then trying to make sense of it. I’m almost through, and had I finished it only a day or two into October, I probably would have added it to September’s reading since that is, in fact, most of what I was reading for the month.
3) the Wednesday before leaving on vacation, both my wife and I were informed we were being laid off at the end of September due to downsizing. We both worked at the same law firm.
So there has been a huge scramble on our parts to finish up work we had on our plates at the firm, cobble together rèsumès, and start applying for jobs. All of which has taken a lot of the focus and energy. I’ve tried to do some reading here and there but the looming unemployment (now here) for both of us has been hanging over our heads and consuming most of our time and efforts.
At any rate, I’ll certainly finish Gramsci in the first part of October and post it with the next monthly reading summary.
4) Given the current lack of income, spending will have to be minimized so… my purchase of new books will be slashed until new jobs are found.
Sigh…
An Italian Education- Tim Parks
Tim Parks is an expat Brit living in Verona Italy, married to an Italian woman, and raising 3 kids. He has bought a house in a suburb and uses his experiences with neighbors, family, and particularly, their ideas about raising kids, to bring insight into the differences between how Italians and those from the Anglosphere raise their kids, live their lives, and think about society and interactions in general.