Oh, the Book Club!!!

The word for today is : procrastination.  Putting things off.  Putting a pillow over your head so as not to be reminded that there's something you have to do.  I am given to procrastination, though not as badly as  I used to be.

The Book Club is coming!!!   Strangely, it is not the hostessing nor the refreshments-planning that I'm procrastinating about.....I am ashamed to say that I am putting off reading the book.

What's the matter with me? My mother said that I was practically born with a book in my hand.  My early happiest moment was when she took me to the neglected and sparsely furnished little library of San Benito, TX--and I laid eyes on a copy of Dr Dolittle.  I went everywhere with Thomas Stubbins and the cats' meat man and Dr Dolittle.  Polynesia was my favorite person.  We even went to the moon together. I wanted a Pushme-Pullyou.  It was wonderful to be able to travel the world in their company.

Now, I have been everywhere with Azimov and Zabokov  and all the others in between.  For a while, science fiction was my field and I became as at home in Alpha Centaurii and Betelguese as I was in Brownsville TX where I resided by then. I learned the humanity of inhumanity as I went to Mars with Ray Bradbury's bemused astronauts and came home a very different person...or went to his carnival and came out tatooed in body and soul.

Early on in high school, I came upon Brideshead Revisited, and The Ballad and the Source, and read into a world stranger to me by far than Mars ever was. But I read on, and when my mother gave me Pride and Prejudice for Christmas, I found my home and happily settled in. English literature was all my joy, and in college I especially enjoyed the Eighteenth Century dramatists. It took me another twenty years to find the Seventeenth Century ones, more interesting to me now by far---but, heck, I love them all.

So--WHY OH WHY can I not open up and "get into"  As the Great World Spins, by Colum McCann?  Perhaps I shouldn't have read the blurb, as the idea of someone walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers isn't appealing to me. Or it's the fact that I read  Everything in This Country Is, by the same author and was not much impressed. I have two weeks to read it and it is as bad as weekend homework or my Sunday School Lesson. No, thanks. Uh-uh. Busy. Tired. Can't see, and the light is bad. I don't want to....

For eats I am serving apricot pie (2011 is the Year of Pie, in case you aren't on the Internet and don't get the important news)...made from pre-thickened filling from a can (my sister says it is delicious) wrapped up in supermarket crusts. That is the best I can do from my scarcely-functioning oven. No problem there. When the time comes, I'll just do it. Wish I could say that I'll have read the book.
      YAZZYBEL