Home from work

I'm home sick today. I hardly ever do that, mostly because it's so much work to get things ready for a sub teacher that it's easier to just go in. But not today. Today is all about fire in my stomach. You know it's bad when you keep reminding yourself of the main character, Port, in The Sheltering Sky (a book that I love; I hear the movie stinks). He is slowly dying of malaria. There's lots of descriptions of the desert woozily shimmering around him all psychedelic-like, and of his stomach feeling like liquid fire, etc. It's all very excruciatingly described, and not a good thing to be able to relate to.

Since I don't have the book to draw a quote from, I was just online looking for one. They all seemed to be about the book's larger existential theme, if you can call it that. Not everyone thinks of intestinal agony when they think of the book, apparently. Then I found a book club guide that included questions like this: "What keeps Kit and Port Moresby together as husband and wife? What role does their friend, Tunner, play in their attachment to one another, and how do their mutual episodes of infidelity affect the course of their marriage?" Ugh. God. Is that what book clubs do? That sounds so terrible to me. My book club would have to be renegade. I could never sit around and answer college literature class essay questions! We'd have to make up interpretive dances or something instead.

This is why I never pursued a Lit. Master's despite loving books so much. Analyzing them too much kills it for me.

So, the other thing I found online was a list of books to read while you're traveling in various countries. This list recommended The Sheltering Sky for people traveling in Morocco and Algeria! Great idea. I definitely would want to read about slow, lonely death in Morocco and Algeria by parasitic intestinal destruction while traveling through those countries. That would be my very first choice.