They work beautifully!

lord_kjar and I went into town this afternoon and picked up my new reading glasses. I am quite happy with them. I also went to the library before leaving campus, and picked up two more books in the series I am reading. When I got home I picked up a book and something to eat and settled in. Put it down when I had finished reading to go out and shovel a bit of snow, came back into the house, picked up the book, and read it through to the end.

It has been years since I have done that, and it feels wonderful! I am quite certain that a huge part of the reason I was able to read the book pretty much straight through at one go is the new glasses--it was comfortable to read, and, when I put down the book and switched to the distance glasses (which I have had about a month now), I could see the rest of the world just fine. For the last year or so every time I spend much time at the computer or reading a book when I put it down I couldn't see anything else. As a consequence I haven't been spending so much time reading.

Add to that the fact that lord_kjar and I have so many hobbies and projects on the go, so that I am not sitting down to read that often in the first place, and the fact that it is only now, four years after moving to Sweden that my Swedish is good enough to read books that I haven't already read in English, and it is easy to understand why it has become so rare to read a whole book in a day. Granted, this is a kid's book, but even a month ago it would have taken me at least a week, if not to months to have finished.

Sadly, it turns out that I managed to miss one of the books in the series (the En ön i havet (Faraway Island) Series, by Annika Thor) when I was checking them out. I had looked up the series last Friday, but by the time I stood in front of the shelves today I didn't remember the titles of the books, nor how many there were. It turns out that the books themselves don't have, as American books usually do, a list of what other books are in the series, so I had to rely on the description on the back cover to even tell if they were about the same girl or not. I found two that were clearly about the same girl, so I checked them out. But soon after I started reading the first of those two I started wondering what had happened in the four years that had elapsed between the first book and this one. Over the course of the rest of the book there were enough flashbacks to those missing years that I now have a good idea, and I have checked the author's web page to confirm that, yes, indeed, there is one book in the series that I missed when standing at the shelves today. Oops. I wonder if I will go back and read that one or not, since I now know much of what happened in it, and what happens after.