Truthfully: school drains you; reading article after article, writing paper after paper leeches out all your desire to look at the written word. And as a graduate, 9 to 5 work has been draining in a whole new way. It doesn't consume your time and brain energy the same way school did, true, but after eight hours of work, just the endurance of it can take a toll. Watching TV is way more relaxing than going to the gym, you convince yourself. Spend a little time online shopping instead of cracking a book open.
Having a long time to relax with lots of interim travel periods (on a train, on a plane) provided a legitimate opportunity to get into long stretches of uninterrupted reading, which is the way I prefer to do it -- sprinting through 100 pages of a book, drinking it in as deep and fast as I can. Fifteen or twenty pages don't allow you to get into it. This type of marathon reading takes hours - an hour, at the least.
Ideally, I would read someplace like a cafe, with a coffee and biscotti keeping me company. But I've actually felt a strangeness where I currently live when I do this -- people my age just simply don't do this.
At home, there's too many distractions.
In the park, only children accompanied by their parents go to play. Couples sometimes sit together on the grass, leaving no room for a solitary person.
But within the past four weeks, unusually, I've been able to read the following books:
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: a poetic if bizarre book that's definitely well-written
- The Forever War by Joe Halderman: sci-fi fun with time dilation and parallels to the Vietnam War
- Bossypants by Tina Fey, 50% of it: my friend read all of it and thought that Kathy Griffith's book had more consistent laughs. but I enjoyed the memoirs and found Tina Fey pretty funny.
- The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss: an interesting experiment-turned-lifestyle-turned book about a reporter that transforms himself - with the help of established pickup artists - into the ultimate playboy, albeit somewhat drawn-out
- Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins: fast and fun sequel to the Hunger Games, soon to be a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. It's a good read and I'm always a sucker for strong female leads, although I did find the YA-appropriate romantic angsty-ness a little annoying. Then again, I am probably not the target audience of this book series.
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, 85% finished: I'll wait and see.
-Kim
