Sick reading
Jan. 4th, 2014 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaI have been shuffling and snozzling around the house this week with the cold my sister-in-law’s family had at Christmas, and I’m also at a point of increasing vertigo, with which the head congestion is not helping in the least. So naturally it seemed like the perfect time to talk about what I want to read when I’m different kinds of sick.
With a cold like this, when my head feels thick and stupid, I do not want a big chewy piece of nonfiction–in fact, I set aside the one I was reading when I came down with it and will go back to it later, because if there is ever a time for not trying to keep track of the Soviet takeover of various Polish community groups, it’s when you’re blowing your nose every five seconds. In contrast, when the vertigo is moderately bad, there is nothing for it like trying to keep track of things like that. Thick chewy nonfiction (that will last and not make me get up to get more) is just the thing for that kind of sick.
Moderately high fever sick calls for very vivid books. I read Sean Stewart’s Galveston with a moderately high fever, and honestly I recommend this course of action. It was quite good that way. (I checked later. It’s also good healthy.)
When the vertigo is catastrophically bad–when my work-arounds are not enough to work and I can’t do anythingreally–the right kind of books are rereads, because Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan and Mervyn Bunter hold still when the world will not.
But this kind of miserable dragging-on cold, with some vertigo, the best thing for this kind of sick is books by authors whose other works I have enjoyed, and not highly complicated ones, either. Much though I was enchanted by Aurorarama, I am leaving Luminous Chaos for when I feel better and will apprehend it properly. One of you lovely people sent me some Dodie Smith novels, and they have been just perfect. Mystery series would do beautifully, which reminds me of an email I should send, but things for which I have to go to the library are not really useful at the moment. So: rereads and known authors, not too horribly complicated but enough to be engaging. That’s where I am now.
What do you want to read when you’re sick?
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-04 05:50 pm (UTC)In the Travel category, it's mostly books that I can stop reading at any time and not worry about having to go back to them. This is like the trash romance of scifi, mostly genre stuff.
In the Sick category:
* Life Classics - Not True Classics, these are books that I have read so often, I can re-read them while sick and still enjoy them.
* Mainstream Comic Books - I can't read true comic art (like Kabuki) while sick, but most things published by DC and Marvel work fine here.
* Finnegan's Wake. Yes, really. If I have a fever, I read Finnegan's Wake. Sometimes I read it out loud, to my cats. If they answer, it's a clue to go to the Doctor.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-04 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-04 06:12 pm (UTC)Pound and Zukofsky and the like. The Cantos and A make so much more sense when I have a fever.
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Date: 2014-01-04 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-04 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-04 09:04 pm (UTC)In the dragging-on-cold phase I like to read upbeat urban fantasy or middle grade / YA fantasy, or things I loved as a kid and have half-memorized.
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Date: 2014-01-04 11:22 pm (UTC)If less sick as I am at the moment re-reading easy things like Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, Dianna Wynne Jones or Nora Roberts. Or reading short stories from collections that won't have anything too unpleasant in them. And cookery books, they are safe and while I might be bemused by them there is a sense of order I find comforting when ill.
Basically nothing that requires a great deal of concentration.
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Date: 2014-01-04 11:45 pm (UTC)Yes. Which is why I personally can't do anything graphics-intensive when sick, because I process words much more automatically. Manga would be Right Out.
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Date: 2014-01-04 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 06:19 am (UTC)Hope the snozzliness passes!
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Date: 2014-01-05 08:42 am (UTC)I read a lot of mysteries when I'm feeling under the weather. Recently, I've been rounding out my acquaintance with British golden age mystery writers by reading some of Josephine Tey's Alan Grant novels (which on the whole I quite enjoy - she has a few odd social attitudes, but her plots are clever and her characterization is good) and Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley mysteries (which I have a mixed opinion of. I quite enjoyed _The Saltmarsh Murders_, but thought that _The Mystery of the Butcher's Shop_ wasn't nearly as good. Still, they've just released a couple dozen of them rather inexpensively in Kindle editions, so I'm sure I'll try a few more.)
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Date: 2014-01-05 05:28 pm (UTC)I am fond of Josephine Tey too, and I have just discovered Zoe Ferraris, who is starting well.
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Date: 2014-01-05 06:20 pm (UTC)I think it depends a little bit on the book in question. Listening to a leisurely-paced first-person-narrated detective story feels subjectively like a very similar experience to reading it myself. (Except that reading it myself is much quicker.) Listening to non-fiction feels more different from reading it. I think.
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Date: 2014-01-05 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-06 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-06 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-06 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-15 02:48 am (UTC)