Twain vs. Kidd

I'm a reader. I have been for as long as I can remember. I'm also a book snob. My favorite book in the eighth grade was The Count of Monte Cristo. I started reading Les Miserables my freshman year of high school. I devoured Dickens, Dumas, Austen, Hemmingway, Shakespeare and Faulkner like they were oxygen. My Christmas lists were comprised of books and miscellaneous random items like tennis skirts (I don't know). I used to play school. Nerd.

And then there was Ben.

I have a half a dozen half-finished books littering my nightstand. Adam Bede and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court stare me down every time I approach my bed. But I just can't do it. I want to--I do. When I go to the bookstore I drool over the classics display and fantasize about myself curled up on the couch with Gogol and Rushdie, savoring every delectable morsel. And then I try it. I grab that damn Yankee, crack open the deliciously yellowed pages (I'm a used book junkie), and dive in with alacrity. Two paragraphs in, I'm cranky because I don't feel like thinking that hard and I'm falling asleep. Then I toss the book on the nightstand, turn off the light, and bury my face in the pillow, exhausted and guilty, like I'm somehow forsaking my English degrees and disappointing Dr. Walter-Carney, the Rhodes scholar I studied under that helped me get into Columbia.

It's just that I'm tired. I teach middle school English and History all day and come home to a sweet and wonderfully needy three month old. All I want to do after my little peanut goes to bed is curl up in front of the TV and slip into a deep coma, passively ingesting mindless and addicting crap. McDreamy and Michael Scott do not ask me to think. Dostoyevsky does.

But I must read. I spend my days singing the praises of reading to a couple hundred apathetic twelve year olds. If I don't read I'm a hypocrite to them and a disappointment to myself. So I pick the next best thing to The Fountainhead: The Mermaid Chair.

If you know me, you know I'm all judgy about contemporary fiction. Most of it is meaningless crap written by what sounds like fifth graders. The stories are pedestrian and the writing is horrifyingly juvenile. Either the vocabulary and prose are simple (but not the good kind like Hemmingway) or the authors sit there with a thesaurus and try to pack as many lofty, superfluous phrases as they can to make the book longer and "deeper". Yet here I am, in an attempt to avoid George Elliot and Mark Twain, reading what has to be the dumbest book I've ever read (save the Left Behind series).

So here I am, begging you. Please. Give me some titles. Save me from this book. I need something that isn't going to make my brain explode, either from profound depth or sheer stupidity. I need a new A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This week is the teacher discount week at Barnes and Noble, and I've got birthday gift cards to spend. Help!