1:11 p.m.,
Feb. 14, 2002
I catch colds so easily, and I really hate it. I am sitting here in my pajamas after a rough night, waking up every two hours and just feeling generally miserable. Maybe I rocked the Tylenol Cold a little too hard.
My head has cleared up, but I just feel weak and icky. Yuck. Maybe I should go back to bed.
I finished Empire Falls last night. It's awesome. If you have some spare cash and you like to read, go out and buy this book. It's epic, touching and incredibly well-written. Its story centers on this small, economically depressed town in Maine and how its citizens deal with being trapped in it. It really captures small-town life -- the desperation, the way people mistakenly think of it as idyllic, the various histories that mark everyone who lives there.
It was so nice to read a book for pleasure, as well. For the last few years, all of my free reading time has been devoted to school books, like Modern Latin America or Decolonising the Mind. While these are certainly worthwhile books that were important for me to read as a person and as a student, it's such a treat to just get lost in someone else's story and read for the sake of reading. God, did I miss reading while I was in college.
It's sort of ironic, the way so many kids don't have time to read while they're in school. I traded a rather intellectual hobby for academics. And it was a shame because reading other people's stuff really inspires me to work hard on my writing, and so I think my creative skills fell off a bit in college.
But thankfully I graduated, and now I'm reading regularly again. I'm rediscovering the joy of reading books, and that's just the best thing in the world, I think.