(no subject)

[proximoception]

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.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Shame - it was a disappointment. I tried it when I was young so it just led me to suspect everyone. But why had I such great hopes? I think the title.

Wakefulness, and coffee - for what little it's worth, I try to alternate it with exercise. Which seems to help me actually wake up, if that's possible, or push me towards sleep, if that's possible.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I really really tried to read Shame. Got four or five pages into it, many times. Rushdie has joined Gaddis in my now-I-will-never-read-this pile.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Exercise helps with absolutely everything but the sleep problem plays havoc with routines.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

There was a time when people believed in Rushdie. Hard to believe in that belief now. I read that book on an airplane to somewhere many years ago.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

(was talking to a guy in Boston who was .. kicked off Rushdie's Twitter for insisting that the Author's understanding of American baseball was laughably inadequate [it is red herring, i'm guessing? that S.R. has probably never written about baseball? it is Mystery !]).