Thanks for reminding me about Joyce, guys. I know it's a "guy" book but the language is just magical. I needed to read it about three times in the course of my English major, and kept on reading it about once a year for a long time, until my life got too complicated. Stream of consciousness seems to mesh with the random abstract nature of my own thought processes. It was liberating to see that people wrote that way. What was that futuristic Russell Hoban novel written in stream of consciousness and an evolved English language?

I'm afraid I hated *Gone with the Wind* when I read it at 16 yrs. I had already been recruited into the civil rights mvmt by the radical thrology students from Princeton (thanks, guys) and the racism turned me off. I never have seen the movie, except for excerpts in movie docs.

On the advice of my best friend in high school I tried Ayn Rand. nope. I was already too far gone. And what is wrong, I still say, with testing out a new invention and assessing its impact on everything before blundering ahead??

I still dive into too much (quality) escapism. I love Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan sagas, and heaved a sigh of relief when he finally fell in love with someone who reciprocated. C.J. Cherryh is another I like, though I liked her earlier things with language better than the piled-up angst stuff she writes now.

To space out and take my mind to a place it needs to go I read Rumi.

But, like I said, I'm a reading addict. This is why I don't practice more and why my house is such a pit.