Just sit on the line

Last week, I set myself the usual weekly reading target with the best of intentions in getting through the readings and then some, hoping that by this time it got around to this Monday I would not only have blitzed the set readings but also managed to get through some of my other backlog on the side. Despite having a tab with Les Mis open on my pc browser, Plato on my kindle and Dickens ready for me on my phone, I was able to bring myself to complete almost exactly zero reading over the week.

At least one step too far into this series.

The one thing that I have attempted to spend the most time reading, The Long Utopia, the fourth book in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Long Earth series, continues at a snail's pace, a source of great frustration to me because I really ought to throw it on the life is too short to care pile, but I just want to like it a tiny bit too much to bring myself to do it. The series is based on a Pratchett short story that I enjoyed, but as it has gone on it has become more and more like every Stephen Baxter book I've ever read, which is to say  ponderous, touching on interesting concepts in the least interesting ways imaginable and either leaving a number of plot points dangling for the inevitable sequel or tying making them irrelevant along the way. The fact that I've spent the time since Christmas when I checked it out of the library trying to get through it when I'd normally demolish a book this size in a week maximum is a good indication of just how well it's going.

As frustrating as I've found this novel, the fact is that it's not the novel's fault that I'm not getting any reading done. It's not the novel's fault that I've struggled to engage with my writing or to produce a crossword this week either. For someone who has been feeling generally like all this being cooped up indoors isn't having that great an affect on his life, I sure am wandering about the house listlessly staring at walls a lot, so maybe I'm just not as unaffected by everything that's going on as I'd like to think I am.

So I've decided to be gentle with myself and just let things happen. Reading is supposed to be fun, so is the blog and so are videogames after all. If that means there's not a weekly Great Conversation piece, somehow I feel like both I and the readership will survive.

In lieu of that, then, let me leave you with this delightful little poem from Jeffrey McDaniel that a  friend linked me just when I needed a good sob earlier in the week.

Let's talk some other time.