Reading

Over the past three years, 2016-2019, the length of time Frank and I have been living in Penticton, we've read about twenty or thirty books. I say "we" because I've been reading to him almost every evening since he lost his sight on November 25, 2014 (Giant Cell Arteritis).
Unfortunately, I haven't kept track of which books we've read or when we actually read them. Most of them I've given away, but one or two are harder to part with. I did mention in an earlier blog about a book I actually tossed in the garbage. I expected to enjoy it because it was a murder mystery, and my favourite books usually kill someone off early on and spend the rest of the chapters helping me work out the puzzle. The one I tossed out might have done that, but I couldn't stand reading aloud the terrible "Appalachian" dialect. Otherwise known as just plain ignorance, in my not so humble opinion.
Right now, we're reading The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Before that, we read two books by Captain Marryat, The Children of the New Forest and The Settlers in Canada. Earlier this summer, we read Michelle Obama's Becoming, and thoroughly enjoyed that. When we first came to Penticton, the reading plan was to read everything Sue Grafton ever wrote. We did that, and then we both wept when her daughter announced that "the alphabet ends with Y." Sue Grafton died before she could write "Z" to her alphabet mystery series. Other books we've read since coming to the Okanagan Valley, include some kids' books about World War I, all of Stuart MacLean's books, Swiss Family Robinson (which Captain Marryat didn't like because the author, Johann David Wyss, romanticized the ship wreck and had animals that wouldn't have been found at the location where the family was supposed to be. Marryat wrote his own version, and maybe one day we'll read that one). We've also read a book on opera librettos, I don't remember who wrote that. One of the books I enjoyed most was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, one of my favourite authors.
In this list of favourite books I'm not including The Holy Bible. We've been reading that together since long before Frank lost his sight. We used to take turns reading it--he'd read a chapter from one version, maybe The New Revised Standard, for example. And the next night, I'd read a chapter from a different version, probably The Catholic Study Bible. I liked to use that one because we could remember when to go to the Apocrypha for the books that are left out of the Protestant canon. We started this tradition somewhere around 1998, if not earlier, and have continued to this day. We usually read one chapter a night, so the Protestant Bible takes three years. (Read 3 chapters a night to complete the whole Bible in one year.) Once during this time, we took some months out to read the Koran aloud to each other, using two different translations. I recommend it, no matter what your views are on Islam. It's only fair to know what you're talking about. So, I think that we've read the Bible from cover to cover six times. The odd thing is that we often find that we could swear we'd never heard some of it before when we know for a fact we've read it repeatedly.
I'm going to stop here, before this post goes missing for the second time. I'd like to give links for the versions on the Bible that I've listed, but I'll leave that for you to Google. This site is too unreliable.