Restless, Unaccomplished Reader

This is one of the more boring parts of my day, the hour between Newshour and whatever the hell comes on at 8 p.m. How sad is it that I haven't found something better to do with myself most weekday evenings? How bad do I feel asking you to read about it?

BOOKS I HAVEN'T READ LATELY
Yesterday, I started to read The Soloist, this year's One Book One Philadelphia book which I checked out from the library. It's okay. Frankly but not surprisingly, it reads like a newspaper column. The language doesn't challenge the reader or the author, but it's functional. I'm so bored, I might finish reading it. I think I'd rather be reading that Junot Diaz novel, but I haven't gotten around to buying it yet. (Why am I going to buy the Diaz and not the other book? I only like to buy reference books and classics, and I rarely pay retail for them. Sometimes I feel guilty for not buying more books. My mother and her sisters buy books like mad, and in hardcover. I feel like I ought to actually buy at least one work of recent fiction, and that Diaz looks worthy. I gave up reading Falling Man, not because there was something wrong with it, but because I just couldn't bring myself to get into reading 911 fiction. Now that book is overdue. I couldn't bring myself to read beyond the beginning of What is the What because I didn't want to deal with that horror either, but for different reasons. One horror has been played over and over again, the other is relegated to side bars.

Things will be better when there's more daylight.