Home, I guess

Well, I am suddenly home, as I certainly did not expect to find myself the last time we all saw each other. Tragically, I had to return The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the BPL before I left, and I hadn't even finished it. Woe is me. However, in a stunning display of intuition and anxiety, I managed to check out the entire series the day before the public library in my hometown closed.

I'm always looking for new sci-fi, she said, having read not much actual sci-fi beyond Ender's Game. I enjoy the genre very much and have always wanted to get more into it, but fantasy has always been my first love. Just barely. Hitchhiker's Guide, however, immediately sucked me in in a different way than the other sci-fi I've read. The worldbuilding, while complete, feels in no way forced, which is very difficult in books that take place in settings other than our own. And it's so...clever, I guess, is the only way to put it. Witty. Very British, I suppose, as if I knew anything about Britain beyond Doctor Who.

I hate when people say books are an "escape from reality," but honestly, this week, it's been quite a relief to go on a whimsically distressing space adventure with Arthur Dent. Odd, considering that the Earth blows up in the first chapter of Hitchhiker's Guide (sorry, but I'd argue that it's not a spoiler if it happens in the first fifteen pages), but it's sort of comforting to relax into shoes that aren't my own for a while. Even if they are shoes that are constantly in danger of death by space, alien, or poetry. I'm bored out of my mind here. The least I can do is take a quick trip off world and laugh at some life threatening plights.

In my endless quest to vanquish boredom, I've also picked up The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love a good 1920s novel, I have to say, even if they do all kind of read the same after a while. Oh, no, some twenty-year-old white dude is in love and depressed about it. Whatever will he do? Talk about being depressed for a hundred pages, according to the Lost Generation. And there will be no point to the whole story, just as there is no point to life. At least, that's what it feels like right now. I'm not very far in, but it's very The Sun Also Rises at the moment. (Did Hemingway and Fitzgerald hang out? Oh, Google says they did.)

You'd think I'd be reading more since I've literally been doing almost nothing since last Thursday, but instead, I have started three new TV shows, eaten gross quantities of bread my mother baked (there was no bread in any of the stores by us because people, as we all know, are awful), and slept. Very little has occurred, but I am unlikely to get sick. So there's that, I guess.