After trying to decide what to read, I wound up buying Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Yeah, I missed that hipster train by about six years, but I figured better late than never. I prefer to read amazingly-reviewed novels when they’re new, or at least when they’ve just come out in paperback. As for the other kinds of books: if I see one more 20- or 30-something woman reading Eat, Pray, Love on the subway, I’m gonna hurl. For all I know, it’s an excellent book. I just can’t stand to see it anymore.

So — I started Everything is Illuminated last night and I’m 20 pages into it.

Does it get better?

Maybe I’m in the wrong mood for it, but it seems to be trying a bit too hard. Or maybe I’m just over pomo fiction. Maybe I should have picked something with more conventional prose. I was going to read Arthur and George. If this book doesn’t pan out, I may pick that one up.

Or maybe I just need sleep. I feel rotten today. We went to bed at midnight last night, but I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. Got out of bed, got back into bed; repeated a couple more times. It didn’t help that the sun was rising by 5 a.m., since it’s the fourth-longest day of the year. (The solstice was on Friday!)

I was going to stay home today and try to sleep, but I still couldn’t sleep, so after two hours I gave up and came into the office, because the idea of sitting alone at home on this dark and cloudy day, feeling droopy, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to, filled me with dread.

In the last few weeks I’ve woken up in the middle of the night more frequently than usual. It tends to happen around 4:00. I wonder if it’s a sign of depression or a sign that I need new pillows or that we need a new mattress — or an actual bed, since we don’t actually have one. (Wow, look at the nested structure of that last sentence.)

Zzzzzzzz…