Reading challenges

So I’ve been browsing the net (as you do) and somehow, I entirely forget how, ended up on Restless Reader. Browsing on from there, I came across A Novel Challenge, which is a blog dedicated to tracking down reading challenges that people have created and then posting them all in one place so that more people can find them.

I’m an avid reader myself, but I’ve never done a ‘reading challenge’, aside from the ones they give us at school, which are normally along these lines:

Okay, children, we’re going to set you a reading challenge! Isn’t that fun? See, the aim of this challenge is to get you to read. Now, we want you all to read one book this school year. That’s quite a challenge! Don’t worry, though, because it’s only September and you have until July. Of course, we don’t want to pressure you, so if you don’t want to read a whole book, that’s okay. You can just read half of one. And if you don’t think you can read much more than a chapter, then of course that’s fine. And if you never get as far as opening a book in the first place, then that’s perfectly all right, as long as you tried.

Actually, come to think of it, that’s pretty similar to what most of our English lessons are like. I digress.

Anyway, I was thinking it might be interesting to have a go at one of these. The one that’s caught my eye for the moment is the 2008 2nds Challenge. I buy lots of books from charity shops and then put them straight up on bookmooch or give them back to charity when I’m done, so it might be interesting to take that a little bit further.

Watch this space!

Trent & Mersey

I’ve been away this last week (got back late Friday night) on the Trent & Mersey. We spent a week on a narrowboat, as we do every year, enjoying the canals and soaking up the scenery.

This year, we rented a canalboat from a couple who were advertising their boat on ebay. I think it’s fair to say that it’s probably the worst boat we’ve ever used. Of course, if your idea of great electrics includes wires and plugs hanging out of the walls, your idea of a great layout is one that means you can’t have the dining table up and sit down at the same time without a great deal of difficulty (not to mention a double bed that goes across the boat and whole rooms for the engine and a whole pile of crap you’ll never need, like deckchairs), your ideal situation is one where you have to climb along the ridiculously narrow sides of the boat if you want to get to the back (try doing that with a cup of tea!), you like boats that haven’t been cleaned and have other people’s false nails on the floor and your idea of a brilliantly working engine is one that needs gallons of water poured into the header tank every day and then starts emitting blue smoke(!), then this boat would be great, but those aren’t our main priorities. That’s not even to mention the faulty lavatory!

In the end, we decided to bring our holiday to a close on the Friday night rather than the Saturday morning as we’d originally planned. By this point, the engine had broken three times (once when we collected the boat and then twice on the way round), the faulty toilet was backed up so we couldn’t use it, we hadn’t been able to moor at a water point because the boat was 70 feet long (that’s long for a narrowboat; it’s the longest we’ve ever had, and it’s only 2′ shorter than the maximum you can fit on that canal!) and didn’t fit and the engine was looking like it was about to die again. What, you thought holidays were supposed to be relaxing?

Here’s a couple of choice photographs from the trip: