A moral victory

I bet you thought this was going to be another post on Iraq. It's not.

Five years ago, when I was just beginning to woo the lovely future ms. wobs, she told me that one of her favorite books was Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. In an effort to impress her, I went out that summer and purchased the book, hoping to read it and then be able to engage her on it, thus causing her to fall hopelessly in love with me.

Luckily for us (and for l'il wobs!), there was a Plan B for getting her to fall hopelessly in love. I never made it through the book.

It's certainly not because it's a bad book, by any stretch - it's pedigree speaks for itself: The Booker of Bookers - the best book to win the highly prestigious Booker Prize in it's first 25 years. The book itself is incredibly charming, with a wry sense of humor and a dense but satisfying narrative. It trafficks in a magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that I adore. And so the book itself has nothing to do with my inability to finish it.

My first attempt at reading it, in the summer that I purchased it, ran square in to the realities of graduate school. I simply couldn't pick up a dense novel after reading academic treatises all day (the rigors of graduate school pushed me towards sci-fi page turners that offered the vicarious, escapist thrill). My second attempt, late last fall, ended when I temporarily misplaced the book. By the time it resurfaced, I was halfway through another novel. Both times, I read to page 92, but no further.

Today, I'm happy to report, I read past page 92 - not the end by any stretch, but I'm officially on my way.

Third time's the charm, they say.