Reading in Rehab

My Makeshift Hospital Desk Top

I'm still here at the rehab center following my May 6 accident.  The doctors, therapists, and nurses are supposed to meet around noon today to agree upon a target date for my release (which could be as soon as tomorrow evening), so things are finally looking up. It always helps to have a target end-date in sight.

Needless to say, it's been another of those long stretches during -which books are more important to me than ever - and that is despite the fact that, because of the steady diet of pain pills, I am having more trouble than usual concentrating on my reading.  I am very lucky right now if I can get through ten pages before falling into one of my countless 2-minute naps.  

I have, though, managed to finish up a couple of books that I started before the fall: Anna Quindlen's Miller's Valley and John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye (it helps that both are excellent).  I even managed to write and post a review of the Robison book from here despite my problem staying conscious - and I spent way too long on a review of the Quindlen book yesterday that had to be junked because it read to me like something from a drunken haze when I began editing it. But even that one is about half finished now, so my time hasn't been completely unproductive.

I'm also working on a handful of other books in between physical therapy sessions as my reading mood changes throughout the day.  Those include: an ARC of Yasmine El Rashidi's Chronicle of a Last Summer (a coming-of-age novel about a young Egyptian woman over the period 1984-2014), the Dave Eggers 2012 novel A Hologram for the King that is now the basis for a new Tom Hanks movie of the same name, and three electronic review copies that I've been reading for a while.  Those three are very different from one another; one is a baseball book about the comprehensive use of statistics to manage major league games, one is a prison novel, and the other is a "time travel" novel in which time actually freezes (rather than allowing itself to be traveled) for all but the novel's narrator.  Without all of this to keep me busy and amused, I would probably have lost my marbles at least a week ago.

So there you have it, the exciting life of a man with a broken hip and no place to go.