To join in the fun with fellow bookworms, and at the same time support @therovingreader’s new contest, I’m submitting an entry just before contest time ends.

(Next time, I promise not to be late!)

I wanted to post an entry last week, but due to mild illness and student responsibilities, I procrastinated…….And it just proves how doing so is not good for your mental health!

Let’s see, I came up with several ideas of what to do for adventure reading but had to discard them due to unfavorable circumstances.

1. Nature adventure reading – Our music department went for a social outing that involved hiking up a mountain to see several falls and do some swimming, but unfortunately, I ended up with a mild asthma attack the day of the outing. (I was left behind!)

2. Risky adventure reading – Now, here in the region where I study, there are open-air buses where you can ride on the roof. But the rails on top are only about twelve inches high, making it rather dangerous though it’s pretty normal here. You have the option of hanging on to some ropes but that’s that.
   Didn’t manage to do this one either, the weather was kind of grim, like it was about to rain so I nixed it. Though I reaaaaally wanted to try but my friend dissuaded me.

3. Scary adventure reading – For this one, I was going to go to this partially-constructed building on my college campus and read there. My guts didn’t make it.

4. So finally, I went with…….TADA!!!! – Sneaky adventure reading!

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My Sneaky Adventure Reading

As an upstanding member of our school’s orchestra (and as orchestra admin), I’ve always behaved well during practice, well, most of the time.

This time, I decided to play rebel and put in a little reading time during our weekly rehearsal (Oh dear). The book that I played truant with was one that I’ve been waiting for ages to be released, Cast in Deception by Michelle Sagara.

I’ve been a loyal and devoted follower of the Chronicles of Elantra series since the first time I read the first book years ago, and every time one is released, I try to get ahold of a copy ASAP. This afternoon, I found out that the latest book was released some days ago. It was perfect, so I got an electronic copy of it online.

To give a brief summary of the series, it’s about Kaylin Neya, a girl works for one of the three branches of law enforcement in her fantastical world that’s ruled by a dragon emperor. She’d consider herself as a normal person, except for the fact that she has a set of mysterious tattoos that appeared on her body when she was a child. As the books progresses, she finds out more about the importance and power of her body art, and of course gets into a ton of trouble due to it.

It’s a mystery, mayhem, magic, adventure, and action-packed series that is inhabited by dragons, fae-like races who love cloak-and-dagger politics, lion-people who destroys furniture, winged species that save our heroine, and more interesting individuals and stuff that you have to read for yourself rather than hear from me. Really.

(The romance aspect of this series bothers me though. It’s super slow, like worse than a turtle out for a walk on a frozen lake. It’s the thirteenth book, and there’s no sign of anyone even nearing anything that could count as a confession.)

The downside to being a stalker of these books is that you forget what happens in the previous ones because of the time between the releases. I think I’ve read some of it about three times already, if not more (I don’t keep count).

Anyway, I made sure Cast in Deception was in the book app in my phone (I use Moon Reader), and off I went to orchestra practice.

I have to tell in advance, it was a disaster.

It was fine in the start, during tuning. While everyone was preoccupied with making sure their instrument was making the right sounds, I was reading and taking pictures at the same time (not exactly doing both at the same moment, that would be almost impossible….I think).

I managed to put in a few pages before the rehearsal started in earnest, then everything went downhill from there.

At first I kept my phone on my lap. As a cellist, with such a big instrument in front of me, it would be hard for the orchestra conductor notice that I was using an electronic gadget (sorry violinists, cellos are just awesome despite being bulky to carry around).

But it was kind of troublesome, I kept looking up at the conductor and then down on my lap when there was time. I felt like those toys whose heads kept nodding up and down.

So I placed my phone on the music stand. Thankfully this time our first seaters in the cello section arrived, more camouflage for me to hide behind!

I managed to escape detection throughout the practice session, though some of my fellow cellists thought that I was being weird taking pictures and reading while the rehearsal was ongoing.

It was hard trying to read while giving some of my attention to making music.....Having your concentration solely on reading only is still the best, but what I read during practice stimulated my interest in what was going on in the book and continued on when I got home.

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This ends my adventure reading entry for this week!

Conclusion: I wouldn’t want to repeat this one again in orchestra rehearsal. I missed playing several entrances, played at the wrong sections, played a landslide of wrong notes, played a passage that no one was playing, played the wrong dynamics, and a ton of other stuff…..And in the end, I only got to half of the first chapter! I guess I do better when I just concentrate on doing one thing at a time.
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Well, I had fun trying at least.

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That’s all for this week’s entry. Thanks to @therovingreader for the opportunity. I’ll try again next time (and hopefully at that time I’ll be able to finish several chapters at least……)

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P.S. – In the spirit of some of the other adventure readers having their adorable pets accompany them………I just had a cat design on my shoes to accompany me!

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