Thursday, August 28, 2014

Acturally reading -- a book!

In my marathon TV watching of the 1990's series Reba and Murphy Brown, my brain (after a second miserable round of eliminating mood enhancement drugs from my system) suddenly said, "Hey, stupid, maybe you might actually enjoy reading a good book.  Not just a ladies magazine or a People-type magazine, but a real book."

Earlier in the summer I had optimistically ordered several Kindle books that promised (from their reviews) a good old-fashioned wallow in literature.  I had just never had the ambition to crack their spines, so to speak (Kindle books don't have spines, of course).

Earlier in the summer I had devoured Robert Galbraith's (AKA J. K. Rowling) The Cuckoo's Calling but after that my reading had been relegated to fluff -- or absent all together in favor of marathon TV reruns.  But yesterday I actually finished Elizabeth Gilbert's (of the Eat, Pray, Love fame) The Signature of All Things:  a Novel.  Granted, I found it tough going in spots and all the scientific philosophizing had me out of my depth but I read the entire 501 pages and can recommend it to my friends who care about botany or how Darwin came up with his theories.  It's a family saga, supposedly, not a mystery (my favorite genre) and nobody really has a happy ending -- but that's life, yes?  Gilbert can tell a good yarn and she is so very smart that all through the cataloging of mosses and orchids, one is mesmerized by how much she knows about such things. 


Now I'm finally ready to delve into the new Charles Todd (I've read EVERYTHING by this mother / son writing team) World War I novel, A Duty to the Dead which is a Bess Crawford Mystery and, based on past history, I probably won't emerge until the novel is finished. 

Brief update on the med situation:  the second round of pills was no better than the first.  Now we're ready to try round 3 with the adviso, that if this doesn't work, we are out of options.  Also last week, Hubby decided that big shiny steel machines at the Y was the just the things we HAD to try, so we went and I tried and was fine on the simpler machines, like the recumbent step, but then I moved on to something with weights and pulleys and back bends and spent all last Friday laid up in bed, moaning and groaning.  Now we've added in the muscle relaxers.  Hurray for good meds!


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