too busy to read :(

It's been awhile since I've posted. Why? Well, it all started with Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, an intellectual history of the march to the Russian Revolution (well, the October one anyway). This book was on my list from my grad student days, and I thought it was time to get around to it.

But it's a loooong book, and I had a tendency to fall asleep while reading it. Just thinking about it makes me feel a little sleepy. French thinker after French thinker after... and then some utopian communes in America, and then finally Marx and Engels, and their rivals. And then Lenin. And Trotsky, who comes off as quite the peacock. (The original edition of the book came out in 1940, just before Trotsky was killed in exile.) This is the kind of book that I'm glad is around, but that I wish I could have read in a condensed form. In retrospect, I should have just started with Marx.

I digress. I wanted to get to the excuses for not writing. I was slogging through Wilson, and thus not blogging. And then I finally get through it, right in time for work to become INSANE. So there hasn't been time for reading, for writing, for checking e-mail, etc. (On the other hand, somehow I found time on Wednesday night to read a truly ridiculous chick lit novel - Some Nerve, by Jane Heller - about a journalist for a celebrity mag who loses her job when she can't get an interview with a superhot but elusive actor. She goes back home to the Midwest, and lo and behold finds the perfect opportunity to prove her journalistic chops. Unless love gets in the way. Oh, and she battles panic attacks, which are intermittently believable.)

I think that after tomorrow, work will calm down some. And then maybe I'll get to catch up on New Yorker's, and books, and posting. And springtime, damn it!