Because I'm Trapped in an Apartment

It is kind of ridiculous how much I've posted already, but as my title indicates, I am stuck in my sister's apartment and have nothing to do.

First of all, welcome to the blog, Alyssa!

(I realized now I was sort of a tool and forgot to ask everyone if it was ok to invite Alyssa, but I figured everyone loves Alyssa anyway and if you have a problem, you can send me a flaming email.)

I just realized that much more time has passed than I thought, because my cell phone wasn't working and was stuck at 1:51, and for the past four hours I've thought that it was 1:51 and was quite excited that I hadn't actually slept for that long and I had much of the day left to do nothing.

Never mind that I didn't realize it was 1:51 every time I checked my clock. I didn't sleep very well last night (again) because my parents were staying with me and snore like none other. And the headache that I've had for the past two days is still a dull ache. I should really find some Advil.

Oh, if you want to get email notifications, go to Settings>Email>BlogSend Address and enter your email. You'll get an automatic notice whenever someone publishes. Also, I changed the name of our blog from Lethargians to Lethargarians (though the url is the same), because I started reading The Phantom Tollbooth and apparently we'd remembered it incorrectly. It's not a big deal, of course, but my obsessive compulsive mind wouldn't let go until I'd changed it. And about comments: the email notification won't tell you when someone posts comments, so you'll just have to look at those at the site, I believe.

So I wanted to post a reply to Alyssa's post, but it took me five paragraphs to get to it. I see a trend...

The Last Girls: I love the South! Will you post a review when you finish?

The Da Vinci Code: The book is weak on many points--the subplot romance is ridiculous and should just be eliminated, the villains are one-dimensional, and I kind of wanted to kick the main character, but it is a thriller, after all, so it might draw you in anyway, just to see how it all turns out. It's a fast read (I think I did it in one night), but that might have been because I was in the throes of Catholic guilt when I read it and was afraid to read for fear of being struck by lightning yet too engrossed in my rebellion to stop.

As for reading books you just aren't interested in (which is what usually happens if you receive one as a gift; hopefully that won't be the case with Princess Academy), I usually leave it around so that I'll get so desperate for something to read that I will. And sometimes it works. I remember I received The Witch of Blackbird Pond for my birthday one year from a friend and left it around because I wasn't that intrigued by the back cover, but during the summer I opened it as car reading material and now it's one of my favorites. And the Ann Rinaldi phase I went through in middle school was inspired by the same situation. And while I doubt that you'll become an avid Dan Brown fan, I feel that the general way to approach a book is with a somewhat open mind. Or at least an indifferent, starved for words mind.

Plus, the benefit of books that are unintellectual and faddish is that they tend to be easily and quickly read, because that's the only way they'll be able to appeal to a large number of people with little patience. Take the Meg Cabot Princess Diaries series. They're trash, but they're addictive. And though I might not really exercise my brain while reading them, I still get a laugh every now and then, and an appreciation for Cabot's style of writing, which is very distinctive and vivacious and good for blogging and silly things. In addition, I get a sense of accomplishment, because I can finish one in under two hours.

My problem is that rather than a gateway drug, these books sometimes get to be the only things I read, because I don't have the necessary attention span to read a longer and more complex novel. That tends to be the biggest problem I have with reading. When I read Life of Pi, I hit page 40 and couldn't go on for a year, until I was stuck on a 9 hour flight to London and the in-flight movie was In Good Company. How do you combat that mid-book slump? Or the quarter-book slump, which is even more dangerous because it's so easy to just stop?

Ciao bella!