A Whole Week

After a day working at home on a conference paper, which I always expect to be relaxing but actually ended up in eight solid hours staring at the screen writing and re-writing the same passages, I am now at that wonderful point - the first morning of a week off.
J has big plans for the house, and is currently four storeys high up some scaffolding looking at the roof, which is terrifying, so to calm me I am thinking about what reading I want to get done this week. A whole week with nowhere to go is a rare treat, and I want to make the most of it.
Don't hold me to this but at the moment I am planning the following:
Finishing books I am half way through: Pale Fire by Nabokov, which I am really enjoying, and All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing by Timothy Steele, the latest stage in my quest to learn everything there is to learn about poetry. This was a book recommended by Stephen Fry at at the end of his book.
I also ought to finish Pandora in the Congo, which I am not enjoying as much now. I think I need to lower my expectations and then finish it on a lazy afternoon.
Scenes from a Clerical Life by George Eliot, which caught my eye the other day when I was looking through a pile of books. I have an up / down relationship with her, Mill on the Floss was dreadful, Middlemarch was wonderful. So I'm always a bit wary of her. I want to read it this week as the edition is a lovely old Everyman, with the gold leaf on the spine, and I hate carrying those in my work bag, they never look quite as good afterwards.
I'd like to get quite a way through Hans Holzer's Ghosts which has been sat on my desk for the past few months. It is a huge volume of descriptions of hauntings and paranormal investigations carried out by Holzer; I like to read big books when I'm on holiday, the sort of book that is an effort to carry around.
And on that theme, a large Folio edition I would like to read this week is Montaillou, about the Cathars - a group deemed heretical in the fourteenth century, when the Catholic Church launched a crusade against them. I have found heresy a fascinating topic since reading The Name of the Rose.
I want to spend some serious time with some poetry books, e.e.cummings is my favourite at the moment. He wrote such beautiful, funny, and often, despite how they first appear, very formal poems. One I read last night ended with this phrase:
'Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves'.
Poetry like that takes my breath away.
Then I hope to get through a couple more of Plutarch's Lives, and there will of course have to be some Columbo time and maybe, if I can get away with it without my husband noticing, some Hart to Hart - I know its bad but I love it so much, I'll do my penance in the garden. I also hope to catch up on writing about the ever-increasing pile of books I've read recently before they slip from my mind for ever. Should be a good week.