18 | December | 2010

In the last week, I’ve written a novel’s worth of articles, supervised (and tried to help) while my husband and friends moved some furniture around inside, and also into, our house, helped a friend pack to move half way across the country, picked up a cake for another friend’s birthday, managed to shatter the glass of my iPhone when my dog knocked it from my hands, and I’m also rehearsing a song for church. If there was a way to get a roadside assistance plan for my brain, I totally would.

While this has been going on, I’ve noticed that reading has become a struggle. Either I’m too tired, or too hyper, or I just don’t have time. I posted a few days ago that I was not in a reading mood at all, but that’s not true. I want to get lost in a book, and am in the middle of three now (up from two), but I’m not connecting to anything. It’s like, I only have the mental capacity to hum Christmas tunes and watch cheesy movies on Fa-la-la-la-Lifetime.

I know this mood won’t hold, but I was really hoping to manage to complete 104 books this year, and I’m short of that goal.

So, I wonder – what does everyone else do when reading becomes a struggle when it never was before?

On Thursday, December 16th, Booking through Thursday asked:

If you could be a character from any book, who would you be? And why?

I must not be taking my multivitamins because I swear there was no Booking Through Thursday prompt when I wrote my piece on the 17th. I guess I must have missed it.

In any case, the truth is that there are many characters I’d love to hang out with, but there isn’t one single one I’d like to be. One type maybe – feisty literary heroines like Jo March and Anne Shirley really appeal to me, but I really don’t want to live in either of their time periods, and while I really enjoyed reading Tania Aebi’s account of sailing around the world in a wooden ship as an eighteen-year-old, I know myself well enough to know that I am not happy without access to hot bubblebaths, espresso, bookstores, my dogs, and high-speed internet access.

Lame answer, I know, but the truth nevertheless.