Well. I'm not sure what exactly happened to me this weekend, but I suspect Saturday night had something to do with it. I went to Barnes and Noble Saturday morning and bought Fool's Fate, the last in Robin Hobb's Tawny Man Trilogy. I planned to make myself wait a bit to read it. But that night my hubby was off at a track meet and about 6pm I was finishing dinner and it was sitting there on the table and I picked it up, just to see how it started.Which was a silly excuse even for myself, since I'd already read how it started at the end of Golden Fool. Nevertheless, I picked it up. It's a 900+ page book. I soon realized that the things I wanted to know would not be swift in coming and almost from the start I began my skim reading mode -- leaping over descriptions, exposition, and all the little historical excerpts that begin each chapter. I didn't get up from the chair at the dining room table once I started it. Not to turn off the cooler when it got too cold, not to go to the bathroom, not to go eat when I got hungry again sometime around midnight. That's also when my hubby came home from the track meet. He had brought dinner, and I ate one of his french fries, conversing distractedly with him about the meet as I kept going back for more of the story.
Finally he gave up on me and went to do his after the track meet assessments on the computer. Sometime later he came and told me we were probably not going to be very happy with ourselves in the morning. By then I'd reached the 700s and glanced at my watch: 3am. I'd read for 9 hours straight!
When I stood up, I got dizzy, and for a moment my eyes wouldn't focus on anything beyond arm's reach. I have no idea how I did that, but... I guess I can get pretty intense when I'm engaged with something. And we had communion Sunday the next morning. Or, well, that same morning, I guess.
Amazingly, it didn't go too badly. We went to Starbucks on the way and I had no problem staying awake for the lesson. Not until that afternoon did I crash and take a two hour nap, which is very unusual for me. Then I read the remaining 200 pages and overall thought I'd gotten off well. Even as I seemed to recall that perhaps it was the second day after such an excess that was the worst...
And yes. It was. I was good for nothing but mindless chores today. And not even much of those. I didn't really sleep, but I couldn't get myself to pay attention to anything. And midafternoon I got a pretty nasty fatigue headache. But at least the book is read more or less, and though I plan to read it again from the start thoroughly, I hope that I've taken the extreme edge off the need-to-know-what-happens.
I'm really going to have to do a few blog posts on these books. Not reviews, per se, just reflections. They always spark a lot of thought.
Anyway, that's the reason there was no post Sunday night. I was reading and even if I hadn't been, I was completely wordless.
Grace,
Karen
