I finished Midnight’s Children and started Aesop’s Fables. Jared went out last night to visit with an old friend so I should have been super productive all evening (after the boys went to bed of course). Instead I read a little, surfed the internet, and then fell asleep. For some reason I have a really hard time falling asleep at bedtime. In the middle of the day I could be out like the proverbial light and at 9:45 I just dropped right off. But Jared came home and woke me up and then after that I couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time. Very frustrating. It is also now too cold to walk and read. My hand feels like it’s going to simply drop off after about five minutes. Sad.

Midnight’s Children was a wonderful, rich and very sad book. It seems to speak with the very voice of India (not that I’m an expert) and that voice is complex, strange and, yes, very sad. Every time some international crisis appears on the news and politicians start pontificating about how we should step in and deal with it I think about how that country has a deep history that it is highly unlikely we even know much less understand. The ambiguities of a disordered, quickly changing history are so much more difficult than a briefing on “the situation in Georgia” or Israel, or Iraq…