One to grow on

So I was hoping, today, that I would be able to finish the novel I’m currently reading on the way in to work this morning, since I was planning on catching the bus and that version of the commute gives me the longest stretch of uninterrupted reading time. The reason I wanted to finish the novel (which did not seem like too overambitious a goal, since I only had about 75 pages left) was because I have some serious DIY reading to get done in the next few days, before my wife and I embark on a serious attempt to salvage the scorched remains of our yard. I also found it moderately amusing that the novel in question is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, which is a sci-fi epic about colonizing and terraforming our planetary neighbor and getting plants to grow on its forbidding surface, so transitioning from that to Safe & Easy Lawn Care makes for a pretty good mash-up.


However, it was not to be. Our weekend jaunting off to Pittsburgh and touring the town and staying up late and getting up early to beat the gameday breakfast rush and then attending a Steelers game which was tremendous except for the last 45 seconds or so and then getting back on the road in the rain and getting home late and seeing off the visiting/babysitting grandparents was exhilarating, and predictably exhausting. So while I got up with the alarm (or close enough) this morning and did succeed in catching my bus, the combination of continued rain and autumnally delayed sunrise made the prospect of dozing on the bus much more appealing than reading, so after about five pages the book was in my lap and my eyes were closed.

The triumph of sleep over reading (an outcome which occurs with more and more frequency the older I get) in this case has another layer of curiosity, which is this: as I’ve been reading Green Mars (and the preceding volume, Red Mars, a little while ago) I’ve been consistently struck by how undriven the narrative is. There’s a larger overarching storyline about the relationship between Earth as the decaying expansionist homeland and Mars as the wild frontier but Robinson deliberately avoids including any perspective characters who are movers and shakers on Earth. All the chapters of from the POV of original colonists (who have taken sci-fi longevity treatments so their lifespans can encompass the decades upon decades upon decades of early Martian/human history) who each have their respective reasons to be insulated from or ignorant of what’s going on with the old planet. The net effect is that sometimes long stretches of the books go by where many ideas are examined in wonky hard-sci-fi detail but nothing really happens, and some other times things are happening but the perspective characters don’t understand the root causes or the implications, which are therefore opaque to the reader. And I respect how this creates a very parallel sense of confusion for the readers which mirrors what the characters are going through, but it requires some extra effort for me to focus on it as I read, sometimes. Not that I don’t enjoy a challenge, but I guess I must read a lot of dumbed-down books lately because I find this all so out-of-the-norm. In any case, Green Mars is finally now getting to the penultimate scenario where things on Earth are really circling the drain and Mars has a shot at successful rebellion and revolution and independence and all kinds of exciting stuff like that. And yet it totally put me to sleep this morning, right when things are getting (relatively) exciting. Alas.

Work, reassuringly, remains unexciting. The crazy, time-consuming side-project which would take six months minimum if everyone sees it through every tedious step of the way hasn’t been cancelled yet. The contract to which I am attached got uneventfully renewed and last week I got a shiny new badge that will let me into the building and office through September of 2011. My corporate HR department is inbox-bombing everyone with information about open enrollment for benefits. Same old, same old. And I suppose on balance I should be grateful for that. If I’m going to stumble into the office half-asleep on Monday morning because I just woke up from the supplemental nap demanded by my slightly mold-breaking escapades of the previous weekend, it’s nice to be stumbling into a place that’s pretty well free of surprises, nasty or otherwise.