fine whine

Now that I am a week out of it, I think I can say that doing the novel writing month might not have been a completely good idea. For one thing, I completely shirked my "learning Japanese" duties that whole month, as well as the vacuuming. Moreover and much more importantly it has changed the way I read books. Before I merely read the books, enjoying them as appropriate and then moved on with my life. Then November rolled around and I got this foolish notion into my head that I too could write a somewhat smaller version of my favorite pastime, and promptly went about said pastime with a gusto unseen in the previous months. The books I read in November were without hesitation the best I'd read in a while, at least taken as an aggregate. Some of them stand up on their own, too. Anyway, once I was "done" with my "novel", nothing has been the same since. Now when I am reading a book I not only read it but I size it up, in the manner mentioned in Fight club, and all the while think one of three things:

• Could I have written this?
• I could have written this.
• I never would have written this.

Seriously, though, now I am confronted nearly every time I read an amusing or interesting book with the thought, "This is how I would have written my novel!" Which is bad, because I am nowhere in the same league as any of these people, let alone Mil Millington, whose Things my girlfriend and I have argued about I am laughing my way through (and trying not to mentally revise into Things about which...). It's a very funny book—both funny and affectionate, if the pullquote on the cover is to be believed. I'll have let you know when I'm done with it (tomorrow).