(Y-11) Vacation Time

Today marks the first day of the two-week spring vacation period.

Also, tomorrow will be the mid-point day for this eleventh year of reading, for which I’ll post something on Monday morning to see how I am faring for the first half of this amazing year.

As always I have big plans for my reading, and in between, I’ll squeeze some traveling and hopefully some work on my little desert oasis to get in shape for the upcoming summer season, I have been promising myself to have this space to read comfortably outside.

And I will follow thru this time.

I have so much to go thru in this post, and I know that I have been really lazy, I mean this is the second of the month of April and it is almost half-way done.

So let me begin with what I have been reading.

I finished five graphic novels, ranging from some good old Batman to the Mad Titan tearing his way thru the Marvel Universe.

On that note, and trying to catch up with Thanos’ recent storyline, I read Infinity Book II and Thanos Rising, the latter beautifully executed by Jason Aaron, on the controls as the writer, and the amazing artwork by Simone Bianchi.

On the DC Universe front, from which most of the reading comes, I went thru some new, some past storylines I haven’t read and one historic milestone.

To start off, I finished reading the sixth volume of the current run of Detective Comics, beautifully executed by James Tynion IV, it is always great fun to run around with the Bat Family thru the dark crevices of Gotham City.

For some passed storylines, I finally finished reading Forever Evil, by now legendary DC writer Geoff Johns.

I read the first two issues when it originally came out back in 2013 but lost track it and now came to find to read in my Kindle Unlimited subscription, so I took advantage, and let me tell you, watching Lex Luthor as the hero will always be disturbing.

And to keep on transversing the DC Universe, I read some single issues of new material, or at least newly published here in Mexico.

Spinning off the events of Dark Nights: Metal comes a new story about the spooky Batman Who Laughs, developed by the all-star team of Scott Snyder and the wonderful Jock.

Also in the Dark Knight department, the highly controversial and now infamous Bat-penis, I read the Spanish and censored edition of Batman: Damned, by the always edgy Brian Azzarello and the stunning art of Lee Bermejo, this particular edition has the variant cover edition by Jim Lee.

Another series I started reading is Justice League Dark, and I love it from the first page, I am a sucker for all the magical and weird characters from the DC Universe.

I read the first two issues and yesterday bought the third one, which consequently is the conclusion of the first story arc.

Which relates directly to the idea of bringing to the main continuity of characters such as Swamp Thing and John Constantine, from which I am currently reading the first story arc in the Rebirth era of DC Comics.

And now to finish off my recent trek thru the DC Comics Universe, the historic and landmark issue number one thousand of Detective Comics, in which the Dark Knight not only reaches this historic number but he also celebrates 80 years of publication history.

I got the Bernie Wrightson variant.

To close out the comic book/graphic novel front, I read the omnibus of B.P.R.D.: 1946-1948, where you can see the first years of the agencies peculiar cases, all of this pre-Hellboy’s involvement, for he was a wide-eyed kid living somewhere in the New Mexico desert.

And some of the amazing sketch drawings of the series.

Now on the book front, I keep on pounding away on the third book of the Neverwinter Saga, Charon’s Claw, currently on page 327, and I have plans to finish the saga on the first week of the spring vacation so I can start reading the first two book of Brian Catling’s The Vorrh Trilogy on the second week.

In which we are taking a small trip, but more on that later.

This has been an eventful couple of weeks, I went to “Fiesta de los Libros” which is an event of my Alma Mater where you can buy all its the scientific or historical publications but the catch is that the price is around 5 dollars for all the books you can fit on a paper bag they give you, needless to say, I took around 7 bags home with books related to my masters degree.

Below you can see the place and some of the exhibitions during this week-long book celebration.

The other event was a home game of the newly founded Mexican League of Football, in which our fair city, Ciudad Juarez, has one of the five inaugural teams.

They started losing the game by 16 to 0 at the half but came from behind to claim a 24 to 16 victory.

The next game and season closer is on April 28, and hopefully, we will be playoff bound.

Now I will like to talk about my numbers.

For the eleventh year of reading, I have a total of 22,029 pages and closing in the last year total with only 10,119 pages to go, just before the halfway mark.

Still, I am 30 days behind my reading schedule, but what are vacations for if not for closing down gap from crazy reading projects.

In concern of my total reading for my project, I have amassed 255,056 pages of reading and on the next significant milestone, which is reaching 500,000, I have 244,944 pages to go.

And in my projection, which started as the finishing date of the particular number to be on July 26 of 2029, now it has come down to May 14 of the same year, slowly but surely I am gaining ground.

In order to chip away at the page at my total pages to read and on to get that finishing date closer I have promised myself to grab my enormous pile of to read books and try to at least knock down 3,000 pages and a couple of months of ground gained.

Here are some of my reading materials for the upcoming weeks.