I came down with a sore throat on Friday. A bit of a dry cough, but mostly a tickling sort of sensation I couldn't seem to scratch. (Thoughts of a bottle brush entered my head, it was so itchy.) In seeming response to this, my nose started dripping down the back of my throat, so I constantly felt like I had to clear it, to no avail. I slept uncomfortably all Friday night; felt like I was drowning, and when I woke up Saturday I had to admit I was actually sick. Hadn't been sick for some time; not since I moved into this apt early last year, at least, but there it was.
Sunday I felt worse, dry cough, head all stuffy, and no energy. Constant napping all weekend, and it was odd to be just so happy to lie in bed. Usually I'm very restless when lying down, and if I'm not asleep, or reading, or making out, I can't remain there. I gotta get up and do something. Yet this weekend, just lying there and doing nothing more than petting the Jinxers was the best thing ever. Jinx certainly agreed; she's happiest when I'm in bed, since she loves to lie there, usually using one of my legs or hips for a backrest. She almost never sleeps in the bed otherwise, but if I'm in there, she's beside me before I know it. Pity that trick doesn't work as well on the IG.
As a result of my illness, Jinx had about the best weekend of her life, since I was in bed for most of it, and was still dragging and napping a lot on Monday. Tuesday I felt a bit better, but still had a cough that felt like a fish bone in my throat, and it wasn't until Wednesday that I felt back to normal. In fact, I had that post-sickness burst of energy and felt great. The best feelings in life are not so much about how good you feel then; they're more about how you were previously. It's easy to feel great after you've been laid low, since you notice the change, even if you just went from "awful" to "non-suicidal." To take your normal state up enough that you really notice it, you generally need a lottery win or a beautiful new boy/girlfriend in your bed, but to feel great after a cold it takes nothing more than the surcease of your hacking. Keep that eventual silver lining in mind next time you're on death's door.
As a result of feeling good (better) and eating too much (I hadn't had much of an appetite since Friday), I had a ton of energy and stayed awake all day Thursday, and then all night too. When I finally got to bed early Thursday morning, I'd been up for nearly a full day, when sleep descended upon me, it wasn't fooling around. I woke up after 6 hours, peed and drank some water, and laid back down to get a bit more sleep. Next thing I knew it was after 5 hours later, I spent a minute in confused, closed-eye calculations, trying to add up the hours and figure out if I'd really slept for 11 straight hours.
Far as I can tell, I did. I've not felt all that rested today despite that head start, but I am not feeling sick, so I guess that was the price I had to pay. It was a bit inconvenient for my work schedule, since last week I was behind on the hours I'm indebted to put in, and planned to catch up on the weekend. Then I got sick and wasn't up to working, so I entered this week about 10 hours in the hole, and got very little done Mon-Wed, what with my busy schedule of coughing, blowing my nose, napping, and informing the purring apostrophe on my bed how like shit I felt. I'd planned to get several hours in Thursday afternoon, reward myself (for working and for remaining alive) with a bike ride, and then getting another 6-8 hours in Thursday evening.
Instead I slept all day, had to run errands since I'd not been shopping in a week, and got distracted catching up on surfing and email when I got home. My reward for that was a nice hour-long chat with the IG, and then dinner, and first thing I knew it was (technically) Friday, and I hadn't done a damn bit of work all day. A state of affairs I quickly set to righting by typing out a typically-overlong and pointless blog post.
In other news, I saw this ad today on one of those ubiquitous funny video sites, and found it funnier than the actual videos I was wasting my life by watching. It's one of those "get laid tonight" ads that are just fronts for porn sites. They have a bunch of photos of hot young girls they found somewhere, random names and ages get applied to them, and by coupling that with a simple ap that customizes them to your area by tracing your IP# to find your location, it's almost like a one click singles site. Except that by clicking them you'll never, ever, meet any of the girls pictured, and greatly lower your odds of meeting any girls at all.
I didn't click it, but I did laugh at the one photo appearing twice, with different ages. You'd think they would put something into their random image/name/age generator to prevent duplicate photos. I doubt anyone actually believes those girls are those ages and available through the service running the ads, but it's a lot easier to pretend if you don't need to believe your date for the evening was cloned. Twice. Or perhaps more times than that, at bi-yearly intervals.
I've long lamented my inability to check off very many literary classics on those "100 books you must read" lists, but rather than simply ignoring the pangs of guilt, I've decided to do something about it. That's what libraries are for, after all. In preparation for this long term wrong reading rectification project, I've been looking at various top 100 classics/modern book lists, and assembling an essential list of books from them. It's all weighty stuff, Brothers Karamazov, War and Piece, In the Name of the Rose, Ulysses, etc. I'll write reviews as I go, so you can either wish me luck or delete this bookmark now, depending on your taste for such literature.
One such list I found worthy of comment was on the Random House site. Their
top 100 novels seem a fairly representative selection, though I'd assume they only list ones they publish in their Classics line. Perhaps some authors or titles are exclusively affiliated with other publishers, and are thusly, unjustly, ignored? It matters little, since there are plenty of other lists to compare and contrast with, and I haven't even looked over the RH one that closely.
What I found interesting there was not their official list, but the one compiled from reader votes. It's an odd selection, with quality classics here and there, but the top of the list dominated by trash by Ann Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. Those two have 7 out of the top 10, and I feel fairly confident in saying you will never find a book by either of them in any top 100 list of books ranked by anyone other than acolytes of the religion-esque ideologies those authors created and promulgated.
The very top of the list of the readers' choices for
100 Best Non-Fiction is similarly blighted, and by the same two "authors." In fact, the top of the non-fiction list is pretty revealing of the mindset of the people who voted. It's not a healthy one either, since their book choices reveal them as gun-nut, anarchist, survivalist, libertarian sorts. Makes me wonder how
The Turner Diaries didn't make the best 100 novels, and if there's an overlap between the non-fiction voters and Scientologists?
It's also odd how the Hubbard and Rand books are only in the top 10, or not at all. Hubbard wrote dozens of trashy sci-fi novels, but he's got #3, #9, and #10, and no others. If there had been some general swell of Scientologist voters, you'd expect a bunch of Hubbard's books to be scattered all up and down the top 100. Instead it's just those 3, and no others, so the voting had to have been very targeted. Some site popular with the Xenuvians must have promoted vote flooding, and picked just 3 of the master's books to flog. They got the job done, though their efforts pale beside the work of the Randroids. Better keep leaping on those couches, Tommy boy.
Turning my attention back to the task at hand, I'm not sure how I'll present my classic reviews. I read a number of so-called literary classics during my recent, breakneck, degree-finishing dash through a university of higher learning, but I didn't take many English classes, and didn't have much time to reflect on the works I read, since I had so many other classes and so much else to read and write about. I didn't exactly read them for pleasure or completeness either; more like 150 pages of Plato here and an act of Shakespeare there, with a paper due on each Monday evening.
When I read some classic novels though, I'll be reading the whole books, and reviewing them... but by what criteria? It seems silly to review Faulker or Hemingway on the same point scale I've used for oh...
Christopher Piolini. And yet... books are books, and it's not fair to hold them to different standards, or to be too forgiving, just because something slow, boring, and overwritten is venerable? I also have some measure of pride in my judgments, and try to limit the idiotic comments in reviews to my abandoned Band Names section, where most of the mistakes are intentional. I'm happy to admit that I can not appreciate or tolerate Anne Rice's floridly cheesy prose and soap opera plots/characters, but will I be able to make the same admission after slogging through 500 pages of something taught in every Great Books seminar course in the Western World? I guess we'll find out.
I'll probably have to do some extra, critical reading along with the books. Classics of world literature aren't known for being easily-digested or discussed. The whole point is that such books are deep and weighty; that's why they've been studied for decades. Reviewing them based on one quick read is almost guaranteed to be a superficial exercise. Furthermore, the anointed classics haven't become classics because they're fun reads, or full of suspenseful twisting plots. Books become classics because they make brilliant societal analysis via metaphor, or express deeper truths about the human condition. That sort of thing is invaluable, and can be uplifting and enlightening, but it doesn't fit neatly into my starkly-delineating review categories.
So yeah, reviewing them will be a challenge. I'm almost more eager to write the reviews than I am to read the books, now.
Labels: medical, misc, writing
