Oddly enough, I read the novella on the commuter rail during
the course of attending a conference in Boston.
For an absurd number of years, I had been accustomed to having uninterrupted
reading time while commuting on the train, which was the only reasonable way to
access various workplaces. My new job is
but a short car ride away, so I have abandoned the Commuter Rail. It has been something of a slog to get a new
routine established. While I do not
regret gaining back the commuting time (something on the order of at least 1.5
hours a day, and that was when things were running smoothly*), it has been
challenging to find some reading time.
One of my colleagues pointed out that my daughter is quickly approaching
the age when she will toddle about the house without a death wish, so there
might soon be a day when I can read at home during the daytime.**
Everything seems to be coming back these days: the Gilmore
Girls will soon reappear on our screens, Mulder and Sculley are investigating
new phenomena, and Bloom County has reemerged in all of its glory. So too did the glory of Wodehouse for
me. To be honest, I could have done
without the boxing tales, mostly because I see it as a brutish sport. The second half of the book was a delight,
and it reminded me of the reason why I was reading this in the first place: a
twisty plot and witticisms, one of which involved calling a fake South American
country Paranoya. I feel that this is a
much better approach, and I am anticipating this final stretch with much less
trepidation that I did a few weeks ago
*The dedicated readers of this blog (who themselves deserve
some sort of reward) will note that many of my jaunts in and out of work last
winter were elongated by the horrible winter that pummeled the Northeast. Would that epic snowfalls were the only cause
of delays. More often than not the sky
would be blue, birds would be singing, and the train would still be late
because of signal failure, bridge openings, and other acts of a mad
universe. I don’t envy our current
governor his job in trying to introduce order and reason.
**Why not read at night, the more circumspect of you might
wonder. By the time I am able to take to
my couch in the evenings, I have already seen to the needs of: two children,
two cats (one asthmatic, one lacking teeth), my darling husband, my adored new
employer, my albatross of a house, assorted family members and friends who I
have had the luck to remember during the course of this daily madness, and my
creditors. In short, come eight o’clock
at night, if everything is going to plan, I am reduced to a slobbering wreck of
a person fit only to operate a remote control for an hour before collapsing
into the blissful arms of oblivion, until I am inevitably woken in the wee
hours of the morning by one of my aforementioned children, felines, etc.
