20150422.0648

I woke this morning with a strange sensation: hunger.

I do not normally eat soon after waking; experience tells me that my stomach tends not to handle sudden filling well. Usually, I shower and get a cup of coffee or two in me before I go to eat, partly because of my experience, and partly because it takes that long for me to become aware of needing to eat again. (I enjoy eating, far more than I do sleeping, but I am just about as thrilled to need to eat as I am to need to sleep: not at all.) Today, though, I rose from bed with a hollow gut, and I am not certain why. Dinner last night was decent enough (kind of a half-assed ramen/soba dish involving soft-boiled eggs and tasting pretty damned good, actually), and I was not terribly more active after eating the evening meal than I normally am. It does not make sense to me.

What does make sense to me is why the author I am currently reading for freelance work is a best-seller. I will have more to say after I get the freelance job done (which will likely happen tomorrow throughout the day), but I note that the book I am reading reads quire well, indeed. If it is typical of the author in question, I completely understand why the author's books sell widely. It is a welcome contrast to some of the pieces I have had to read, including badly-written vampire pornography that managed to be prurient while eliding much detail. Why people go in for some of the schlock they do...

I suppose, though, that I am no better. The kind of writing that Tolkien and his successors do is often decried as juvenile, fantasy being seen (correctly) as escapist and thus (incorrectly) as reflecting an inability to handle the "real world." Asimov and his like are regarded similarly--with the added bonus of being "incorrect" in their predictions, and of being badly acted, since more science fiction than fantasy is put on screens silver and small. I take in such works gladly and with abandon, which surely does not position me well among the traditionally erudite. (I would note, though, that I am a medievalist by training, if perhaps not so good at it as I ought to be--my Latin is quite rusty--and so I am steeped in the traditions often prized by the ultimately conservative establishment that is Western formal education. I cling to it in the hopes of landing a job.) Then again, at least people who read such works as annoy me are actually reading, and voluntarily. I have to count that as a good thing, both because it means people are reading and because it means people are in the market to buy the kinds of things I produce in my freelance work, meaning there is more money for me to earn.

My reading of popular fiction at least earns me a few dollars along the way...but that does not make it better than others'...