(no subject)

Finished little from the reading list this last month, due to diverse, mostly ridiculous causes, and the next two will be more distracting still, so all that's a mess. Did finish Gulliver's Travels, which was really neat and in its fourth part simply awesome; the two Middleton plays, The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which were trashy enough to be readable but otherwise fairly awful and thoroughly awful, respectively; Lyly's Gallathea, which was lightly amusing and didn't wear out its welcome; Rushdie's Shame, a Marquez-type novel about Pakistan that wasn't bad, if rather exhausting, but also contained nothing genuinely good, except a single throwaway incident: a whistling man is murdered, and his assassin has to continue the tune so no one suspects anything's happened. So good you doubt he invented it, like when a C student's paper suddenly makes a stunning point. Doing Great Expectations now, which I'm loving every page of.

I'll have to cut most of the other books I'm new to and be strategic about the rereading, given how few free and lucid moments I'm likely to find in the next weeks. My father, who I got the sleep problem from, drank a lot of disgustingly strong black coffee to stay afloat. Though this is doubtless part of what killed him, and I hate the taste of coffee at any dilution, I think I'd better try his method. It's very hard for me to read when tired, since reading requires thought, and the weeks when I was supposed to be able to rest proved mythic, so I'd better try something.