If on a winter's night a traveler

"What's this?" you say. "Meg's posting pretty frequently! She must have lots of work to do." Righto! Looming deadlines are more than enough to rekindle my weblog!

So I actually finished yesterday's paper pretty early. A little before 4pm, actually. And farbeit from me to write two papers in one day... So I took the rest of the day off. You see, I've got everything scheduled out. Write that paper yesterday. Do my lab writeup today. And write my hoity-toity-Treatise tomorrow. That's a plan! And it's a good, manageable plan. Don't want to deviate from the plan!

It was good. I got a chance to read. I finally finished the big, long book I've been chipping away at for what seems forever (Cities of Salt if you're interested). Makes me happy because I got a new book last week that I super can't wait to read. So much, in fact, that I'm bumping it to the front of the queue of 6 books waiting to be read.

Actually, I am excited to read it, but that's not why it got cutsies. All books should wait their turn to be read! Otherwise I'll never get to the ones I got longer ago, because the new book excitement would have faded more for them. This new book is The Bone People. It's getting this special treatment because it's set in New Zealand, by a New Zealand author, has something to do with the Maori, and my mother's birthday is frighteningly close. My mom, you see, is a Kiwi-phile (New Zealanders like to call themselves Kiwis). She goes there whenever she can on sabbatical. Likes to think of herself as an honorary Kiwi. Yeah, she's a poser. She's especially interested in the indigenous people, the Maori. At least, that's where she spent most of her time when we lost her in the Te Papa Museum of New Zealand. So I figured, this book may be a good birthday present for her. But first I have to read it myself, to make sure it's fit for maternal consumption. They make such a big deal about parental controls these days, but really, I think filial controls are more important!

So I started this book last night. It's good! I'm definitely getting into it. So this morning, I decided to indulge myself and allowed myself to read a little bit more before getting cracking on the lab report. (I mean c'mon... How long will a lab report take? =D).

It's one of those books with a confusing writing style. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I mean, Jose Saramago, my current favorite author, is rather Faulkner-esque. He writes hugely long paragraphs, and doesn't dilineate speech with quotation marks or even new lines. Which makes it a constant guessing game as to which character is actually speaking... But suddenly it got even more confusing than usual. It totally jumped from the point of view of one character, to that of another, who hadn't even existed before. And there was a close quotation mark, with no beginning... Took me a little while, but I sleuthed out the reason. Actually, happy chance caused me to look at the page numbers... Yeah. There's our problem. In most worlds, 85 does not directly follow 36.

This reminds me of another book, one that I read in the fall. If on a winter's night a traveler. This is another excellent book, recommended to me by Kit, who recommends nothing but excellent books. Its whole premise is this situation that I now find myself in. Two readers, for various reasons, are unable to read more than about the first chapter of something like 10 books. It alternates between the beginnings of books that they read, and chronicling their pursuits to find the rest of these books. Of course, this is much more melodramatic than my life, and involves scandals at the publisher and books being mis-titled and authored, so that when they get what they think should be the completion of the book they've started, it turns out to be a completely different novel, that, yet again, they are unable to finish...

So this whole life mimicking fiction thing is pretty neat. Especially since I've read the fiction. Thank you Kit! But I'm totally bummed! I was definitely getting into my book! And I don't want to just charge ahead, ignoring the 50 page gap. I guess I'll go back to the used bookstore and try to get another copy this afternoon, after class (Evil! class during finals week...). But the worst part is, since my reading has been foiled, I should get back to doing work.

D'oh!