The last three weeks of my life have been a mix of Google Reader, fret buzz, cellular respiration, late night coffee runs, and mysterious bus adventures. Incidentally, finals week was ridiculously fun, except for those ten or so hours where I was huddled over a piece of paper, trying to convince myself that the right answer for a question about amino acid sequences wouldn’t have a thymine base in it, wobble or not. Pardon my nerdiness.

I think the writing mania that overtook me in November has definitely subsided. My idea of writing for the past few weeks has been, “CHANGE THAT WORD. ADD A PAGE BREAK. CHANGE HER BACK TO A WOMAN,” and associated escapades. Consequently, I haven’t been writing much on here, but not much has been going on, unfortunately. I know you wanted to hear about finals-week debauchery or tales of evil twins or penguins with nine legs and catamarans taped to their faces engaging in bacchanalian spectacles of strength and blindness (because I reason that penguins that have lost the ability of sight and consequently movement only have two things in their favor, by which I mean one thing, by which I really mean nothing at all except for the sheer happenstance that someone might get hit by a penguin with a catamaran and other penguins reason it out from the sounds around them enough to laugh and continue drinking). None of these things happened … that I know of…

I have been reading a lot recently and trying to work back to that time when I could binge read a book in a day. Like Gone With The Wind. I admit that at the time that I had the plague so I was pretty delirious, and I probably skipped a few meals to read it so I was running on insanity and static electricity from the mountain of blankets around me. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I signed up for Readernaut, which is a very usable, very easy way of listing and reviewing your books. It’s still in beta, so there are a bunch of kinks. For example, sometimes you won’t be able to find your version of the book on the site (they vary by page numbers and covers, so when you’re keeping track of your progress in a book, it’s important to make sure you have the right one, unless that doesn’t matter to you) and making one can be a little tricky. Rating and reviewing the books is pretty painless, most of the books I’ve read so far — even the more esoteric ones like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which I hadn’t heard of until I won it at the Plan II Convocation (thank goodness for Winston Churchill) — popped right up when I searched for it. God knows why I’m amazed by this — it’s probably just an Amazon search engine. BUT IT IS STILL FASCINATING.

Feel free to try out Readernaut. I’m afraid that I’ll get neurotic and start racing people to finish books, which can only be bad for me, because I start living in books the more I read them. A Thousand Splendid Suns was especially hard in that respect because I kept waking up saying, “OH SHIT, WE’RE IN AFGHANISTAN” when this really wasn’t the case. I’m interested in diving back into Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham). HA, DIVING. READERNAUT. I GET IT. Ahem, Specimen Days is a weird book. It’s divided up into three time periods — essentially past, present, and future — but the only constant thing is Walt Whitman. Lucas, the character of the first third, quotes Whitman all the damn time, saying that he can’t control himself. Which he most definitely can. Lucas is also described as being “wall-eyed” and “gnomish,” which sounds both hilarious and tremendously depressing. I wonder where that book will go from there… as long as it doesn’t take the Of Human Bondage path and throw in an annoying female character who screws up everything around her. I HATE YOU MILDRED. I HATE YOU SO MUCH.