Monday, February 12, 2001

After a rather slow day at work, and a bad day at the gym (the running machine insisted that my heart was beating 190 beats per minute, which is insanely high, so to be safe I just jogged), I tried my hand at super-deformed drawing. Both of the drawings that I attempted turned out quite badly, even by my standards. One was so bad I scratched pencil marks over it, a gut reaction that I regretted almost instantly.

I then read some more of Cold Mountain, a Civil War-era novel that my parents have been insisting that I read. Problem is, I dislike both of the protagonists, whom have extremely bleak perspectives on life. My parents have argued that this is appropriate for the characters, and while I agree, that doesn’t make the book any more enjoyable.

However, despite my opinions of the book, I’ve been sucked into it. I spent several hours reading it tonight, which I have not done to a fiction novel in years. I’ve been out of the habit of reading fiction ever since college, and my hope is that Cold Mountain is helping to pull me back into the fold of Lifelong Readers, to which my membership has lapsed.