Finished

Finished 6th week! Finished A Feast for Crows! Finished my Sahlins reading for Tuesday! Finished 34 valentines for my house! Almost finished my Italian homework for Monday. Nowhere near finished on the epic amounts of art history reading or my astro homework or my astro lab report. The quarter is over halfway done, however, so that has to mean something. Kind of weird to think that time schedules for spring 2011 are released on Monday and class bidding for spring 2011 begins a week from Monday. Kind of weird to think that I'm almost almost halfway through college, particularly considering that I still don't know at all what I'll be doing on June 16th, 2013, the day after I receive a degree from the College of the University of Chicago....

For that matter, I still don't know what that degree will even be in.

Reading ASoIaF has reopened my eyes to a new subset of literature previously ignored, something I call realistic fantasy. Fantasy with minimal tropes and adult content, not something I was reading when I last went on a fantasy-reading binge in middle school. I read some extremely good YA fantasy, Tamora Pierce and Philip Pullman being top on that list. (In fact one of my housemates was reading a Tamora Pierce novel in the dining hall today--I was strangely inspired to pick up those books again, not that I have them with me here in Chicago.) I did not read adult fantasy, however, besides plucking through LotR my freshman year of high school until I got bored halfway through the second book, put it down one day, and didn't bother picking it back up. (I tell myself from time to time that I should try again--it wasn't that it was bad, but it just couldn't hold my attention at that point in my life.) I'm not sure how many book series are out there that are similar to AsoIaF in that sense, but there must be some. After all, I haven't read any fiction at all for years, it seems; whenever I frequented the library through high school and then again last summer, I was checking out The West Wing and biographies and the like, not fiction.

I also stopped writing when I was a junior in high school--the second, third, and fourth worlds inside my head, which so richly provided all sorts of entertainment and speculative wonder, had sort of led me astray at that point. The stories in my head had turned to fantasies of what I wanted the not-so-distant future to be, and for a while reality and fantasy blurred together. When they burst apart again and I was reminded of what was reality and what was the soap opera of intrigue burning in my head, it killed all my curiosity and creativity for probably two years, until at some point last year when I remembered the fun of fiction, real fiction, not thinly veiled attempts at wish fulfillment.

Anyway, the point of this digression is that although I haven't written anything since I was in high school, reading ASoIaF kind of makes me want to do it again. Right this time.