Sick day

Thanks to a long doctor appointment involving a lot of drawn blood, I’m convalescing in my freshly painted apartment today. It looks pretty weird in here with all the furniture dragged into the middle of the room, but the splash of color has done a world of good to my humble abode.

The day off has also given me a chance to get caught up on some reading. I finally finished Robert Sobel’s terrific exercise in alternate history, For Want of a Nail. It was an easy and interesting read, and I would have finished it much faster had I stayed in town the past two weekends. Sobel begins at the Revolutionary War and imagines the future of North America had the British won the battle of Saratoga, and not lost as they did in real life. The book gets off to an interesting start as most of the Founding Fathers are taken to Britain and executed for treason, so the destiny of our continent is in the hands of an entirely different group of men. Taking a different tack from a lot of alternate history that I’ve read, Sobel wrote his book almost like a history textbook, following political and economic development more than individual lives. It’s a great study of what we might have been had one American general hesitated rather than acting.

Once I was done with that book, I started E.L. Doctorow's City of God, and have finished about two-thirds of it already. It’s a little less linear than most of what I’ve been reading lately, so I’ve really had to pay attention, but I’m enjoying it. The basic story involves a cross stolen from the top of a Catholic Church in New York that reappears on the roof of a synagogue, but along the way, most of the characters grapple with faith and their personal image of God.

And to keep with the theme, here’s a bit of one of my favorite Fountains of Wayne songs, appropriately titled “Sick Day’.