I dreamed last week that I had checked out A Time to Keep Silence from the library, on Litlove’s recommendation, and was very let down by it. Instead of writing about visiting monasteries, it was all about visiting chocolate factories! In my dream, I got fed up with Fermor’s constant cutesy references to Willy Wonka, and in the end I took the book and stacked it neatly on top of the other library books I haven’t liked enough to finish. And then this all receded into the fuzzy mess of vague memory, and as happens with absurd regularity, I forgot it was a dream.
Back in real life, when I went to edit my TBR list page yesterday evening, I deleted A Time to Keep Silence from my list. I felt disappointed, and I was kind of frustrated that Litlove would have said it was about visiting monasteries, when all along it was about visiting chocolate factories. I mean why would she say that? I was just in the middle of thinking, Monasteries and chocolate factories! Is that some sort of metaphor? I don’t get it! when it occurred to me that it was actually pretty unlikely that a) she would have said monasteries by mistake for chocolate factories, or b) I would have read monasteries by mistake for chocolate factories.
Does anyone else have a hard time distinguishing dreams from reality? It’s particularly trying when I have dreams that some small, nice thing has happened, and I feel all happy about it for a while (I mean it can take weeks for light to dawn), and then it turns out not to be true.
This one was rather likely – not the chocolate factories, but the tidy stacking of discarded books. I’ve abandoned four books recently (The Book of Secrets, Luna, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, and Indian Killer), though with plans in all cases but one to return to them later or try other books by the same writers. A Time to Keep Silence would just have been another in a series of disappointments.
I’ve just realized I read two graphic novels – The Unwritten and Gunnerkrigg Court – both of which I liked and neither of which I reviewed. And one of them featured Oscar Wilde, and the other was set at a boarding school. So you would think I could have gotten it together to write those reviews. Soon!