I’m still here. Just not feeling very inspired lately. I’ll post soon, promise.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you what books I’ve been reading. A week or so ago, the bf and I finished up The Count of Monte Cristo,which was very long and probably took us a third of a year of before-bed reading. It was very good, very complex, and we both really enjoyed it. One the side, I had been reading A Guide to Georgia Native Plants, an informative reference and a quick read.

Our bedtime reading has changed genres; we are now reading Charles Stross’ Accelerando, a fantastic series of interlocking short stories that won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Award. It’s glorious sci-fi; kind of Neuromancer-y while being less dark and more quirky. And it’s named Accelerando for very pertinent and poetic reasons.

My daytime reading has branched off considerably. I took a brief trip to New York recently, that I’ll talk about more later. While there I finished As You Like It. Truthfully, I did not care for it very much, but it is probably good I read it, even as half-heartedly as I did. I moved on to Beauty and the Beast which was a quick read. Much more Christian in origin that I realized, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It was fine, but Beauty by Robin McKinley will always be the way I choose to think of the story. After I blasted through that, I started The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I am enjoying immensely. The whole “damned” bit is really starting to take off.

In addition to all that, I am in the middle of Cash: The Autobiography, which I received as a Christmas present. It’s the kind of book I would have never thought to pick up for myself, but that I am completely enthralled by. I learned all sorts of intriguing things about cotton culture in the south (that you never learn about in school, even in the south) and about Cash’s time as a Russian Morse code transcriber/translator – something else I had never heard of. Apparently he was brilliant at it. The weaving thread of his struggles with addiction are told neither defensively nor preachily. The love story with June, all tangled up with addiction but shining through will bring a tear to your eyes. All in all, good times reading in general.

I’ve been devoting myself to all this and Torchlight, and cooling my creative jets lately. It’s a rough time of year that I don’t find particularly inspiring, so I am taking it easy and learning, learning, learning. I’ve been learning a lot about personal finance and there is a certain amount of creativity to managing all of that efficiently and profitably, but I’m not sure I can write about it in a compelling manner yet.

So that’s where I am. What are you up to? Has 2011 been off to a start as lackluster for you as it has for me?