"Courage, dear heart." - C.S. Lewis

(Do I acknowledge that it's been a year since I last wrote one of these or do I just keep going like it's been no time at all yes okay I think I'll do that)

After 17 years in a row of full-time education (this is the first time I've actually worked that out...17??), I am officially done. Finished! I graduated with a 2:1 MA in Linguistics and English Language a few weeks ago. They said my name and I got tapped on the head with a really old hat and they handed me an empty red tube and a certificate that you would think would be in the tube but nope it wasn't in the tube. Done did it. Graduated.

Now what? Now I'm delaying adulthood by not being able to work for a few months because that's the way the world works when you marry an American. This means I find myself with a lot of free time! Hurrah! With this free time I am admittedly mostly re-watching The Office but I am also getting some reading done.

I've read 18 books so far this year, which is 2 more than I read in the whole of 2016. It could be that writing a blog about reading actually made me read less, but I think 4th year of university was the more likely culprit. What a time-sucker that was. Man. But then over Christmas, I discovered how great audio books can truly be - I started listening to books while I was walking places (meaning I couldn't be distracted by other things) and my reading total began to rise again, like a phoenix from the ashes.

Revisiting The Chronicles of Narnia was revisiting childhood; it was revisiting the language of yesteryear; it was revisiting the gospel. I think this was my first time reading them as a grown-up (questionable) and even though I've always known that they were based on the gospel of Jesus, this time I was really struck by how clear the parallels are between the sacrifice that Aslan made and the sacrifice that Jesus made, and between Narnia and heaven. Yes. I have no deeper insight than that to give. This is not the blog for intense literary wisdom.

I will leave you with this: did you know that the audio book for The Fellowship of the Ring is 20 hours long? Still trying to gather the strength to start The Two Towers.