Back in February, I decided I needed to read more fiction. And I have. This semester, I’ve worked in a fair amount of Annie Proulx: The Shipping News, That Old Ace in the Hole, and Accordion Crimes, which I’m about 70 pages into. I picked up Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, which consists of her Empson Lectures at Cambridge, and wolfed it down in a few days. (Alright, it ain’t fiction, but it’s about the writing of fiction.) On susansinclair’s advice I read The Eyre Affair, which is fabulously trashy fiction, on the way to Chicago and back.

My habit, which isn’t unusual, is to read several books at once. I haven’t been doing this with the fiction, instead mixing one novel or set of essays with all the work stuff, but this week things got out of hand. We went to Salman Rushdie’s lecture on campus Wednesday evening, and he was so brilliant and funny that we had to go straight to Barnes and Noble afterwards. And The Satanic Verses was the last thing of his I planned to buy, because it’s the cliche Rushdie novel and he’s written so many others, and of course it was what I ended up with. Along with Accordion Crimes, which I found in the used section for $5. And I couldn’t decide which to start on first. So I’m reading both, along with a stack of hypertext theory.

And that’s one of the interesting things about this whole experiment: the fiction hasn’t cut into my work reading at all. I read all the school stuff and I read all the other stuff. The trick is that reading has suddenly become fun again after the long slog of coursework. (For awhile, I wondered if graduate school had managed to permanently suck all the joy out of reading.) These novels have catapulted me back to my omnivorous self, and finally I find myself once more running out to read it all. Every last word of it.