My mini-reading challenge, cliffhangers, and the thing I apparently can binge on

Well, you may just get Seven Things posts for the rest of the summer. It's all I've got the energy for. Because summer. And who's going to complain about that?

1. Dean and MadMax are on a week-long fishing trip in a remote location that involves a 22-mile hike from the trailhead to the river they're planning to float. Yikes. But they're experienced backpackers and floaters, and they're well-prepared, and they're part of a group of five, so I'm assuming that no news is good news.

2. This will be by far the longest I've ever been home alone. It will be interesting to see how I respond. I know I'm good for a few days, but it's entirely possible that by Wednesday or Thursday I will start hanging out at the mall just to see people. And the dog is already driving me crazy. She wants her boys back because they are way more fun than I am.

3. I've set up my own mini-reading challenge for the week. I want to see if I can read seven books in a week. I'll let you know how it turns out. They're mostly books that have been on my TBR list for months (even years), but I admit that I went through and picked books that were less than 300 pages, so it's not all that many pages, really. *cough*

4. How do you feel about books that end on cliffhangers? I've been burned by them often enough that I decided several years ago that I would not start another trilogy-or-similar until all the books were out. Which is why I still haven't read Game of Thrones, in spite of the rest of my family getting into regular conversations about various characters and plot points.

Or Patrick Rothfuss, who published the second book of his Kingkiller trilogy in 2011 and still hasn't announced the publication date of the third (or at least, not that I could find with a brief google search). Dean loves those books, and I'm pretty sure I will, too, once they're all out.

5. So before I started Strange the Dreamer (by Laini Taylor) last week, I checked for a cliffhanger, since the author has written a trilogy in the past. I couldn't find anything that said first in a new series, so I thought I was safe. Authors who write series also write stand-alone novels, right? But about halfway through, I saw someone on Instagram had posted a picture of it with the caption #worstcliffhangerever, and a several comments agreeing, and I dropped it in mid-read. Even though it was shaping up to be one of the best books I've read in a long time, with genuinely interesting characters and premise.

Fortunately I discovered a few days later that the next book in the series is going to be published this fall, so I can figure out what to do about it then. If you don't mind cliffhangers, highly recommend it. And if you read it, let me know what you think.

6. I read Zealot (Reza Aslan) last week, a book about trying to understand who Jesus really was. It's been out for several years, and at the time it was published (2013), it made a big splash as being boldly controversial. To be honest, I didn't think it was all that wild, but I didn't agree with him, either. If it's a topic that interests you, I wrote a review on Goodreads that you can read here.

7. Remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote an entire post about how I can't binge read/watch books or TV series? Yeah. Well, be careful what you say. Just about every time I make a lame statement like that, I end up finding out it's not true shortly after (what do you want to bet that I end up reading a doozie of a cliffhanger by the weekend?). Because I discovered something I apparently can binge on, and it's podcasts. I've listened to so many in the past month that they're cutting into my reading time and everything else, and also I'm getting sick of them. So I think I'm going to stop listening to back-episodes and just listen to new ones as they come out.

And I really wish I had thought of something interesting to say..... maybe a few days from now when I'm desperate for conversation I will write a long post about something fascinating. Or not.