Happy Gurglings about Reading

I flipped the name of the blog again because the most recent name didn't quite sum up anything I felt toward anything anymore.  So that's that.

I've been largely offline for the last two weeks or so. I feel like I keep missing things going on in my online life - I have only a vague idea of what's going on in the lives of most of my online friends, I've barely been on facebook, I even managed to forget about farmville long enough to have some crops wilt.  I feel bad (mostly about missing stuff in my friends' lives), but.

Instead of being online, I've managed to read more in the last two weeks than I have since my exams. It continues to be awesomesauce.  I nabbed the brandspankingnew Philip Pullman novel on Friday and am all kinds of excited to read it.  At the moment I'm finishing Alison Croggon's Pellinor series - I think Pullman will go right after that.  Maybe I'll throw a review up when I'm finished since it's still so new.

I know I've already posted once about how happy I've been devouring books, but it's exhilarating.  I have stories flying through my head all the time now, these incandescent pieces of loveliness that remind me that there really are ways to escape the inside of my own head, or which, conversely, remind me that the inside of my own head has stories of its own that want out too.  I need to stop reading long enough to write some more but haven't wanted to. 

As I read, I'm ripping apart everything as I go along, examining how authors have gone about dealing with plot, character development, description, all that - all the stuff I never looked at while ripping apart lit for grad school.  It continually boggles my mind that after ten years of English (from the three years I worked through the major in college to the two years of my MA and five (so far) years of my Ph.D.), I've never gotten to talk about anything of those things, never really had time to examine the craft of writing for the sake of writing.  I can read and interpret ANYTHING at this point, but when it comes to thinking about the writing, this is all still fairly new to me.  It occurs to me from time to time that I should look up some books on writing and read those, see what others find important, but I haven't quite wanted to do that yet.  I think at the moment that I'm happy with what I'm picking up, and I'll move on to what others have picked up on soonish.  This isn't a "my thoughts will be more better and smarter than theirs" type feeling - it's an attempt to get some sort of idea as to what I think about things before I start to get into the prevailing wisdom of the world, much the same way I'd research a text by reading it, developing the beginnings of my own thought patterns about it, and then going off to read articles about it in order to challenge and develop my thinking even further.

AKA, I'm approaching writing now roughly like I'd approach dissertation research. *headdesk*  The more things change, as it were.