There’s that part in Fight Club where Edward Norton talks about insomnia, saying you’re never really asleep…and you’re really never awake. That’s how I feel because for three nights running I’ve been having school dreams. Not bad school dreams like you’re running down the hallway because you overslept for your exam or you finish your oral report only to discover you forgot your pants at home. These are much more mundane, like the times in high school I dreamed I woke up, showered, ate, and drove to school only to then to hear my alarm clock go off and have to do it over again, only for real.
The last couple nights I’ve dreamed I’m discussing stuff in class, and when I wake up I struggle to determine whether it was a memory or a dream, or maybe both. Anyway, I’m hoping my subconscious reads this post: something other than school dreams tonight, please? Sleep is losing its recuperative power.
I’m finishing books like mad. Within the last few days, I finished Winesburg, Ohio, Heirs of Columbus, Critical Theory and Science Fiction, and I’m within 100 pages of completing Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
None of these books thrilled me and it’s been a tough month for reading. Perdido Street Station was very long but highly enjoyable, so the only tough part was getting the reading done in a week; Heirs and Sands were written in deliberately difficult styles, meaning I needed to read, then re-read, and sometimes even re-re-read just to get what’s going on. This is exhausting work and not what you need at the end of an exhausting semester. So even though I don’t necessarily like that kind of fiction, I readily admit that the numerous questions such texts bring up is fodder for lively discussion. I wouldn’t recommend either unless you’re going to be able to talk to other people about them.
I’ve said this before, but Winesburg, Ohio would have been better to read than listen to. The stories themselves are pretty good but the actors reading them tried to do too much. Long, thoughtful pauses and affected southernish accents did not lend themselves to keeping me attentive. Part of me wants to write Winesburg, Ohio 2010, replete with crack whores, Internet porn, and child molesters. Just for fun.
Current Mood: Back to the Grindstone | 
One Comment
I’m trying to figure out why professors often keep the most difficult novels for last; I’d probably assign the most diffucult as the 2nd book to read on a syllabus (so you don’t scare people off in those first two weeks, but also so you don’t end with the most difficult novel), and finish with whatever I thought would be the most fun, easy, and accessible.
I also agree that there are a lot of texts in school that provide fun and interesting discussions (which sometimes makes me glad to have read them), but I wouldn’t have enjoyed reading them on my own for the story itself.