There’s been a shift recently in my reality. The recent departure of the side job has left me with a whole lot more perceived time, not to mention actual time, and I haven’t really felt like I had so much of the elusive stuff on my hands in, literally, years.

Coming home at night I don’t feel pressure to get something done for them, and not having that pressure feels like a huge burden has been lifted from my shoulders.

I shouldn’t be surprised that the indulgence I’ve allowed myself was to start reading for pleasure again. When i was a kid, living on the farm in central Missouri and trying to avoid my chores and the mundane existence of living on a few hundred acres in the middle of nowhere with nothing to escape to, I’d take solace in reading. Lots and lots of reading — mostly science fiction and fantasy, but really, anything was game, well except for the lame-o christian fiction my parents kept throwing my way.

The bug has bitten me again. Being that I can never seem to rip myself away from the television whenever the Godfather Part One or Two is on, while waiting to get my tires installed at the Northglenn Mall in Littleton, co, I wandered in the local B.Dalton (hard to believe those places still exist anymore) and picked up a paperback copy of the novel by Mario Puzo.

As far as storytelling goes, it’s a bit ham-handed but it scratches this particular kind of itch I have which loves lots of characters and detail, and being a fan of the movies, reading the book definitely helped to sort out some of the things that are glossed over. We get to know more of Johnny Fontaine’s character, which I enjoyed. We also get to read more about Sonny’s manhood, which has to be some of the silliest sex writing I’ve encountered. I won’t bore you with the details. If you are a fan of the first two movies then you’d definitely like the book.

So after finishing the godfather, I dived right into Phil Dick’s “Confessions Of A Crap Artist”, which is a strange tale of mental illness in late-50s Marin County. While it has the trademark character development (i.e. flawed figures plagued by self-doubt) it doesn’t really contain much in the way of science fiction. Strangely enough, i wasn’t disappointed by this and found that I couldn’t put the book down.

My next chore is to restart pattern recognition by William Gibson, which I started and got about 150 pages into, but then put down to deal with some silly work thing. The only reason I feel like that’s got to be next is because I know I’ll be diving into Neil Stephenson’s “Quicksilver” next, and at 1000 pages, I’m sure it’ll be a big commitment.