bookworm schmookworm

I left my laptop at the office last night so as to remove the Internet as a distraction from my life that evening, in hopes that I might sit down and get through more than a few pages of Winter's Tale, which I've been reading two or three pages at a time since last fall. This is ridiculous but kind of par for the course for my recent reading life. When I was little I plowed through books like nobody's business. It slowed in high school in college thanks to homework, etcetera, but when I graduated I figured I would fall back into a pretty intense reading-for-fun pattern. This has not happened. I even worked at a bookstore and yet, in the two years that I've been out of school, I've read less than the number of books I might have bought in one semester. And yes, this totally embarrasses me.

So I've decided that I'm going to blitz through the remaining 400 or so pages of Winter's Tale before June 21st so that I can start Infinite Summer with the rest of "the few, the proud, the vaguely masochistic," but it's looking bleak. What derailed me last night was a pile of dishes in my kitchen sink and also the Walt Whitman episode of American Experience on PBS, which actually kinda blew my mind. I read parts of Leaves of Grass in high school but I might as well have not, because it was completely stripped of context and relevance-- though I guess pressing the intertwined ideas of sexuality and democracy and the sensuality of nature and humankind on a bunch of seventeen-year-olds would be nearly as tough a sell as to the 18th century American literary establishment. Just with more angry parents.

You can watch it all online here.

Wish me better luck for tonight. I'm aiming for five pages. Whoa!