30 Jan Insomnia

I have developed insomnia again. I have sort of dreaded it coming back, but i now realize that it is self-imposed. I’ve re-discovered reading for fun. And then i remembered that i loved to stay up late, late, late reading – just disappearing into other people’s worlds and  other people’s lives. I’ve just finished I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou. I’ve wanted to read it for years but had a self-imposed ban on doing anything fun. Ha!

So, like all good over-readers (i’ve read six novels since Christmas), i’ve created a GoodReads account and am trying to find out what other people are reading. So far, i’m not a fan of most current popular fiction. Jason and i are trying to read novels together, but i apparently have a much better stamina for staying up endless nights in a row until a book is finished (which actually just means two or three), so i keep leaving him behind. In the meantime, i’m squeezing in biographies while he catches up. I’ll be reading a biography of Sylvia Pankhurst (:A life in radical politics, by Mary Davis), a book i nearly assigned in GEOG 431, Geography and Gender, this week.

We worried that there was something wrong with us that we didn’t want to read Foucault before bed. Isn’t that what academics do? Shouldn’t i be reading more history books and literature from and about Haiti? But i realized, the difficulty with reading Foucault, or about the tonton macoutes, or IDP camps before bed (i have two Foucault reading groups running right now), is that i end up theorizing the present (and my dissertation) or getting depressed, and frankly, we all need a break from work. I love my work, but i think i’ll keep it pre-8 p.m., thank you very much.

So, yay! Insomnia!