I know this is too insanely detailed to do verbatim, and frankly I'd rather riff on this than get a carbon copy. It's a Yoshitaka Amano piece and I'd really love to find an artist that felt confident that they could reproduce something with a similar feel.
Just as the title says. I do read frequently as is, but I was starting to feel a little guilty about how many books I had on my shelf that I'd had for years and hadn't gotten around to reading. I made a spreadsheet and did the math and figured I'd need to read about 75 pages a day to finish the backlog by the end of this year. Fortunately I've slightly outperformed that so far, even with taking a few days off from reading here and there. So far I've read:
Outlaws of the Marsh
Ship of Theseus
A Greater Monster
The Saga of the Volsungs
The Elder Edda
Beowulf
The Wanderer: Elegies, Epics, and Riddles
The Sagas of Icelanders
I still have 42 more books to read by the end of the year, and around 17.5k pages to get through, but I feel good about what I've accomplished so far. The first block of books represented a fair amount of difficult reading, with most of it being antiquated. Outlaws of the Marsh was entertaining but was still over 2k pages and had a ton of redundancy. I just finished Sagas of the Icelanders today, which was a relief since it was over 700 pages of fairly dry Viking accounts written around the 1200's. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of entertainment in there as well.
Next I move into some Gene Wolfe novels, which is exciting since he is one of my favorite authors. I do still have some novels looming on the horizon that I'm dreading a bit: namely, Gravity's Rainbow which I've attempted to read a number of times over the years but have never managed, and 1Q84 which is long and I've heard mixed reports on. We'll see how it goes though.
I was watching Perry Mason on HBO and loving the watches everyone was wearing. I picked up this late 1920's Elgin that was running but in pretty rough condition. I was able to find an NOS dial for the watch. Just picked it up from being serviced and having the crystal replaced. I'm really thrilled with the results. I do have a better strap heading my way but couldn't wait to show it off. Having been a jazz guitarist for a long time now it feels really cool to have an American made watch from the time that was the height of the music's popularity ticking away on my wrist.