Senseless Musings on a Thursday Afternon

With 200 pages left to go, I gave up on reading The Chronicles of Narnia -- at least I gave up on reading it straight through to the end. 700-plus pages of children's adventures in a magical land might be fun, but not all at once.

To tell the truth, I was ready to put the book aside after the second book in the Chronicles. Trouble is, I'm reading it for my book club. We meet in another two weeks, and I'd kind of like to have the book finished before then. It makes the discussion more interesting if you've actually read the book. Not to mention the fact that having read the book makes it easier to voice an intelligent opinion. I spent quite a bit of time today trying to decide why I'm so ready to put the book aside and start on something else.

The writing is great. I enjoy C.S. Lewis's voice a lot, actually. It's easy to read and filled with humor. And it's not as if I never fantasized about castles and enchanted forests and the like when I was a girl. My childhood fantasy adventures weren't filled with wars and giants and swordplay, but they weren't Knight In Shining Armor Rescues Fair Maiden either. I guess they were somewhere in between.

But the point is, it's not the subject matter that has me setting the book aside, either. The truth is, I think I'm bored. Not that the books are boring. . . It's just that I think I'd like the books better if I didn't try to read all seven of them at once. I'm not one of those readers who can pick up an entire mystery series and read from first book to last without a break.

That shouldn't surprise me. I'm not one of those writers who can write the same type of book twice in a row, either. I need variety. Lots of it. Back in the olden days when I worked at another career, I needed variety in my work, too. Nothing made me crazier than to go to work and find the same old thing day after day. Luckily, that didn't happen very often, so I managed to hang around my last career for 15 years or so.

But if you want to make me absolutely nuts, just stick me in a room filing for 8 hours a day, or put me on an assembly line. Either of those jobs would do the trick, no questions asked. I'm just glad there are people who can do those jobs without losing their marbles; otherwise, the world would be a very sorry place, indeed. I'm just not sure what these things say about me.

Does it make me creative? Or do I just have the attention span of a gnat? I prefer the first explanation. I'd bet money my kids would vote for the second. But this is my blog, not theirs, and they don't get a vote here, so you know what that means. My choice it is! Of course, I'm not sure that really fits the current situation. Can I say that I'm too creative to finish reading The Chronicles of Narnia and keep a straight face? Or would it, perhaps, be more accurate to say that I've stopped reading for now because I have the attention span of a gnat?

 Hmmmm.... Yep. Too creative. Absolutely!