I came home from my trip to Nebraska with a cold or sinuses gone horribly wrong, although it probably started with the former and ended with the latter. My own tendency to overdo has probably contributed to my suffering. I felt better Friday afternoon and went out to a fabulous concert. I then compounded the excess by going to the Winter farmer's market on Saturday, well I did need eggs, only to find I had overdone it, and my exhausted, achy, congested body sent me back to bed for another 36 hours.
Lesson learned. It has been raining. It will be raining. I shall take this as a reminder .
In the end I was grateful that I had some pretty mindless reading with me for the trip, although I often just opted for sleep on the flight home. On the flights to Omaha I read Kristin Hannah's novel The Things We Do For Love, which was warm and touching, with characters that drew one in, a nice easy read to distract one from the petty annoyances of travel. On the flights home I started the prequel to the Under Suspicion series by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke. Actually I originally started reading Bart Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity, which had just come up as an e-reader download from the local library. I've been a little overloaded on library books lately and I wanted to be sure to finish this one in time, but I quickly figured out that I just wasn't up to it. It is an easy enough read, straightforward and friendly but artless, and my head was pounding enough that I needed to be entranced with the prose, or lulled into a mindless story. What I had initially began as a catch in my through in a mildewy room of antiques, turning into something much more like a bad cold. I ended up simply buying cold medicine to suppress my cough and bouts of sneezing, then sleeping through most of the flights. When I wasn't sleeping, rather than trying to read through my blurry eyes, I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix series Lost In Space.
I spent the next 36 hours or so in bed, intermittently reading the Mary Higgins Clark (solo) novel I've Got You Under My Skin, and continuing to work my way through Lost In Space. The Clark was entertaining, she is a good story-teller, if predictable, but in the end I think the later novels are more tightly executed. But then I've never been a Mary Higgins Clark fan. Lost In Space, was also fun. I didn't expect much from it. I loved the original series when I was a child, but even then I knew it was pretty silly. The new version takes itself a little more seriously, but its still just fun entertainment. Again, it passed the time and I have no regrets. Moises and Tikka were certainly happy for extra mommy snuggle time.
I did finish the Ehrman yesterday; which proved to be a good, friendly, non-academic repackaging of the first few hundred years of Christian history. The growth of a small sect into a religion that shaped Western Culture is endlessly fascinating, and Ehrman does a good job of cutting through a lot of accumulated mists of time and misinformation in an accessible way.
I hope to dig into the new Elizabeth George sometime this week, but it is a big book, and I have been wimpish. I started reading Winter by Ali Smith -- I love the opening chapter, but I want to rustle up my copy of Autumn, and have it waiting in the wings, so that is on temporary pause. I'm currently reading Nutshell by Ian McEwan, which I am finding wittily entertaining. McEwan manages to indulge in beautiful prose indulging his world-weary, prickly, astute social and psychological observations (out of the mouths of babes) coming from the thoughts of a protagonist whose very articulate precociousness also reveals and explores his profound vulnerability and the haunting fragility of life. Sounds serious; it isn't. This is a fun book.