Reading in bed

The first half of December was hard. I got the flu during finals week and had a stack of grading waiting for me to heal. I managed to get my grading done (miracle!) and then I got what's likely food poisoning, but I'll never know for sure.

In any case, I spent about a week in bed, total. I finished The Lovely Bones, which was a good read up till the end. I felt like it wrapped up too nicely and certainly too quickly. Then I read The Glass Castle, a memoir that had me wanting to kill both parents for neglect. And then for my birthday (on the 23rd) I got Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Wow. It's not a very long book, so I devoured it quickly.

The Road is one of those books that grabs you and haunts you. Great books tap into our fears, and this book did just that. How can a parent protect a child? How can we fight death? And how can we do both when the world itself is dying? This is a book I'll read again.

Next up is Vonnegut's Timequake. We have a storm coming in--and I love to nestle in bed and read while the rain pours down.

What about writing? Ah yes. I'm doing a bit of that, too. I'm excited because I'll be spending four days of writing--alone--in mid-January. Lots of work to do, but any progress is good progress.