sometimes i read.
With a lot of help from Chris, I've been working on chez Evans for the last week. Our house was built in the early 50's, when the slogan was "rooms should be small and isolated". So we cut some big holes in the living room walls to open 'er up. Oh the improvement. Oh the daylight. Now I want to buy all kinds of trendy furniture that we can't afford.
The "work" thing is tiring though. Each night when we finish, I'm beat. So the idea of writing new Plink songs seems totally foreign. So I've been in bed before midnight, which feels ridiculous. So I dug through our books (which are all over the living room floor because the bookshelf was in the way of demolition) and found Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, which Colin lent me ... mmm, three years ago? I think it was at the last company we were at.
So I'm about to start this book and I'm all "you know, I must be getting old because I don't really feel like reading fiction anymore". I just finished Endurance, the story of Shackleton's INSANE FUCKING JOURNEY across Antarctica. Which is what that book should be called: Endurance: Shackleton's INSANE FUCKING JOURNEY. The weird religious guy that published my particular edition probably wouldn't go for that title, but come on. These guys survived in the south Atlantic for two years, wearing basically big boots and pajamas. They built their own boats, they killed hundreds of penguins for food, they used ice to wipe their asses, they amputated a frostbitten foot, they spent a fair amount of time waist-deep in the ocean, they killed sled dogs and ate them. For two years they did this. In -35 C weather. With 1915 technology. And everyone lived. The guy that had a heart attack didn't even die.
You can see how after reading that, fiction might seem less eye-popping. But I started the Gaiman book anyway because it was that or go to sleep. And right away I remembered: wow, Neil Gaiman can really write. He has this way of taking potentially Very Serious Characters and making them human. "And there was indeed something coming down the driveway, towards the house. I could see it through the binoculars, clear as day. It was the Devil." (hey, that whole story is online here.)
My other good writer find is Ms. Dooce. Okay, she's not a famous award-winning novelist. But her blog is funny as hell, and it's written well enough that I'm jealous of her skillz. (I think I discovered dooce about 85 years after everyone else with a web browser.)