not even getting up to pee

This afternoon I figured I'd had just about enough Law & Order for awhile (this whole staying home sick thing is getting so boring). I needed to spend some time reading. I'd started Altered Carbon, a sci-fi noir novel, and it's good, but damn, it's so aggressive. Too much maleyness, as I like to call it. Sci-fi and noir are sort of boys' clubs already, not to mention what happens when the genres cross pollinate. Looking on my shelves, I couldn't find anything suitabily femaley that I hadn't already read (wasn't in a rereading mood) but luckily I saw The Passion by Jeanette Winterson on the shelf in the kitchen. Not having read any of her work, I was still fairly assured the voice was decidedly feminine. Plus it's short and wouldn't distract me from finishing my already started books. So I read it all in one sitting. There aren't many books that I've read in one sitting, frankly. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Invisible Cities, Cat's Cradle, and a few others, I'm sure, but as Poe pointed out (more about Poe in coming weeks, I promise!) work is more powerful when you get to read it all at once. The book was pleasant, its pleasure augmented by absorbing it in one dose, and had this one line I loved: "I go on writing so that I will always have something to read." There's something so strange about that line, it's self-involved and oddly naive and I can't quite figure out how I feel about it.