With the exception of a pleasant lunch with a co-worker and a phone call from a friend, today was pretty sucktastic.

I’ve spent the last three hours doing work from home that would normally be lots of fun, but wasn’t because I’m tired, pissed at people (family for almost burning the house down just now - while they were sleeping and I was awake wandering the house and noticed the smell of vanilla and something coming from a closed bathroom and opened the door to find candles left burning near some wicker baskets) and the muse isn’t with me. At all. You can’t force that - at least I can’t.

It’s midnight. I’m going to crawl into bed with The Brothers Karamazov. I’m almost halfway through The Tin Drum and I’ve been having trouble sticking with the narrative. I can’t say that the story is riveting and makes me want to tear through the book, but it’s not yawn-inducing either (I’m not exactly looking for crazy action in my literature). I don’t know what it is, but I keep plugging along and I haven’t had that moment where the book has drawn me in and made me lose track of time. That means I have to change it up and then come back to it.

The Dostoevsky is going much more smoothly. I opened it up, read the intro and dove right in; it seemed like mere minutes later that my train was arriving at my stop when the actual elapsed time was 45 minutes. Yes, this book is engaging. I’m finding myself wondering why I didn’t read it much, much sooner in life. It’s not like I decided that the only Russian writer I could ever like was Nabokov… but I never made the effort to go beyond Anna Karenina, Notes from the Underground and a half-hearted attempt at Crime and Punishment. I may have read some Pushkin somewhere along the way, and probably some others - but not a whole lot.

Maybe I’m moving into a Russian appreciation phase. Maybe I need to buy a balaclava and learn to appreciate vodka and chess more. I already like beet soup.