Rabbit Holes

I stumbled on a book sale at the grocery store over the weekend. I was maintaining my puritanical pauper resolve to not buy a book but, when I was informed all I had to do was make a donation in order to help myself to whatever books I liked, any hope of financial or aesthetic discipline was utterly ruined.

And so I came to be in possession of James Joyce's "Dubliners" and Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" both of which have lead me to ask the same question I always ask when duped into buying and reading "classics". How did this come to be defined as a "classic"? Who decides these things? Because they really ought to be fired. I am admittedly not very far into either of them but it's the sort of reading that I will do only because I have time right now and, I suppose, because it will be good for me, in the way that eating fibre and playing team sports are good for one. I'll do it but I doubt I'll enjoy it. I'm consoling myself that neither can be worse than "A Farewell to Arms" which was, in my opinion, the literary equivalent of eating hay bales while simultaneously playing outfield on a boggy baseball diamond with a cigar smoking monkey flagellating you between pitches. No, wait, the monkey makes that scenario far too interesting; a cigar smoking dentist performing a root canal on you between plays. Growing a beard for three chapters indeed.

The fact that I fall for this 'but it's a "classic"' schtick everytime does nothing to improve my opinion of my own intellect and the fact that I only scored 110 on the test in the "Boost Your IQ" book I bought at the sale, isn't helping either. Admittedly, you probably shouldn't try to test your IQ after half a bottle of wine but I've been holed up due to injuries and rain so I thought it might alleviate the boredom. I suppose it has, in an unexpected way. It's hard to be bored when you're neurotically developing a complex.