Little else to do but read

When I was in the hospital, I happened to come across the book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. It was quite a surprising find because the only other things on the barren bookshelves were a handful of very outdated magazines, a section of newspaper that was a month old, a couple of small jigsaw puzzles that were missing a lot of their pieces and some crayons.

I'd read the first book in the series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo; and while I wasn't as impressed as so many others were with it, it was still a fairly interesting read. I knew Stieg Larsson had managed to write three books and turn them in to his publisher shortly before he passed away, but I had always assumed they were three separate books which contained some of the same characters, kind of like James Patterson and his Alex Cross character. It never occurred to me that the three books were connected along one continuous story line.

So as I read the first pages of the third book, I'm basically reading spoiler after spoiler of what is in the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, that I hadn't read yet. Kind of upsetting, but I tried not to let it get to me because there was little else to do but read, especially when you're always awake. I managed to read the entire 550+ page book in less than 5 days. I probably could have read it all in one day, but one's brain does not function normally when you've been sleep deprived for a week. It's hard to make out the words on the page when you're hallucinating and they keep moving.

I'm now trying to decide if I should even bother to go buy the second book and read it, since I now know pretty much everything that happens in it. My roommate in the hospital suggested that I should just get it from the library, but after I explained the OCD tendencies that kick in whenever I try to get books from the library, she said to just buy it. There might be more to the story than what I already know.

Suppose I should finish reading The Grapes of Wrath, a book I've been trying to read for several months now and I've only made it to chapter 6. Progress on it has been stymied, at first by being too depressed to concentrate, then I was too manic to concentrate. Maybe tonight would be a good time to open it up and see if I can make any progress.