From pillow to post.........

At some point in the past few weeks, it seems my body may have finally gotten the hint that I wasn't going to cave on the sleep thing............
I don't think the trip had any causal effect per se. It could be that a wee break coupled with the gradual lessening of some of the stress issues may have been contributory though.

In keeping with my one-step-at-a-time plan, I've had some success with reading lately as well.

To put it in perspective, in the first 5 months of 2004, I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 books. (To use the common definition of the word "book" as: a written or printed work on sheets bound together.) It was somewhere in here that I fell into the whole insomnia, narcolepsy thing. It took me most of 2005 to read "Huckleberry Finn"...........though I've read it nearly 25 times (honestly).

Earlier this year, I spent over two months re-reading "Another Roadside Attraction".........in the meantime, I keep acquiring books to read.

Apparently the body and the gel-pak are trading information and coming to grips with the inevitable, to wit: I will have back sovereignty over my own mechanicals.

Over the past three and a half weeks, I've finished 6 books. I also stayed awake through all 9 parts of Ken Burns' PBS "Civil War" documentary (to be fair, it was one episode a night). I'll grant you I wasn't struggling with "great works" or anything..............two of the most recently released "Dune" prequels written by Frank Herbert's son Brian with Kevin Anderson (Frank's brain is in the story, but his soul and mind are sadly lacking from the writing.......still must-reads for the "Dune" fan), two histories; "1776" by McCullough and "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman, "Illusions" by Richard Bach, and a book about National Parks in the Appalachian Mountains.

In the summer of my second grade year, I took to reading the "classics" that Mom had accumulated........."Moby Dick", "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "Lorna Doone", "Jane Eyre", "Treasure Island", "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn".........you get the idea. Most days would find me perched on a limb about 15 feet off the ground in the Norway maple tree in the front yard...........rainy days in the back seat of the car.........with a book, an apple or two to sustain me, and after a few trips up and down I finally started lugging the 20 lb. dictionary up in the tree with me. I think I got my own dictionary as a Christmas present that year, albeit a smaller and more wieldy version.......(this isn't a digression, it really is going somewhere).

Back to school that fall, I read the kids books (60 pages, huge lettering, every other page an illustration) to some extent, but I'd gotten an appetite for more.
The problem arose when it came time to recognize the "readers" in the class with certificates for the number of books read, passed out in awards ceremonies held at regular intervals, some of which were attended by parents and the public. Here I was, at nine, reading Hugo, Dumas, Welles, Stevenson, Bronte...etc. and turning in reports on ten or fifteen books a month and getting smoked by kids who were reading "Suzie Creamcheese Stubs her Toe" and "Triple Trouble for Rupert" to the tune of a hundred books a month..........some of the stuff they read wouldn't have amounted to a respectable comic book.

So, I complained. I reasoned that something like "The Count of Monte Cristo" at 1100 plus pages, small print, and no pictures ought to count as the equivalent of at least 25 or maybe even thirty of the kiddie books. To give them credit, my teacher and the principal acknowledged the soundness of my reasoning, but said that any attempt to establish an equivalency would be arbitrary, and difficult to implement. In short; "You're absolutely right, but that's not the way we're going to do it."

It wasn't fair. In essence I was being told to read shorter books. This was one of those seminal moments of clarity and insight in my life.....perhaps even the very first....... that eventually added up to the radicalizing of my way of looking at and thinking about things. There were to be many more.

Which brings us back to books..........

I was careful to indicate before that I would, for now, abide by the common definition of the word "book".

Here is the "Bozean" breakdown:

Book.....between 800 and 1100 pages
Booklet..between 500 and 800 pages
Magazine....between 350 and 500 pages
Short story, essay.....between 200 and 350 pages
Article or anecdote....between 100 and 200 pages
Tracts, brochures, pamphlets, and fliers....anything less than 100 pages

So..........strictly speaking, I read two booklets, a magazine, an essay, an anecdote and an article...........still not bad.

It must be clearly understood that these are not assessments of the worth or value of a written work. It goes without saying that some authors can pack more into a single sentence than some others can in whole volumes of assembled verbiage.

.......and what, you may ask, lies above that 1100 page threshold?

That, would be a "work".........an "opus".......a "volume"......a "tome"..........a "real read"!

Thus endeth the entry.........