On Wednesday night I handed in my last paper and had my last class until September.

Last night, I did the last of my work at my second summer job.

Free, free!

Well, free to work more hours at summer job number one, is really what it comes down to. But also free to stop reading boring essays about reader-response criticism from this book. And free to not write boring essays about reader-response criticism.

Theoretically, I’m free to post more here . . . but not this coming week! I am a-travelling down Statesward, for my grandmother’s 85th birthday shindig. Posting, I expect, will continue to be light.

In the mean time, I’ve started packing and must decide on what books to bring along. The trip begins with a twelve-hour drive and ends with another one, and so I’m picking great chunky books that are likely to last more than an hour or two apiece. So far, my picks are these:

• Four Fires, by Brice Courtenay
• The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkein
• The Camel Club, by David Baldacci
• The Collectors, by David Baldacci

Four Fires is a newish novel by Bryce Courtenay — one of my favourite novelists — and it’s huge! My copy comes in at 992 pages, which is only 16 pages less than the Tolkein. I can knock books this size down pretty quickly, but between the two of them I think I’ve got a lot of car time covered. As for the two Baldacci books, I haven’t read them and don’t really know what they’re about, but they were were given to me to read by my friend H, and so I’ll take them along as well.

And soon I will be gone! My TBR pile has been dwindling in an alarming fashion, but I am expecting nine or ten books to arrive in the mail soonish — and so hopefully I’ll have a nice pile to come back to.