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One thing that gets in the way of getting to bed at a reasonable hour is leaving things undone like brushing my teeth. It might make sense to draw up an evening checklist, just to keep track of what gets done when.
| Task | Time |
|---|---|
| Empty the dish rack. | 5 minutes |
| Empty the dishwasher and load the dish rack. | 5 minutes |
| Make/reheat dinner. | 5-45 minutes |
| Eat dinner. | 15 minutes |
| Floss and brush. | 5 minutes |
| Turn off the telephone ringer. | 1 minute |
| Reduce the answering machine volume to 0. | 1 minute |
| Turn off the lights. | 1 minute |
| Go to bed. | 5 minutes |
So the whole routine works out to 43-83 minutes, or 45-90 minutes, to be less spuriously accurate.
Adventures in Unhistory, Avram Davidson, Tom Doherty Associates:
Having read just two of these rambling, judicious, and mind-blowingly erudite forays into the real-life basis for legends concerning the Moon, Prester John, and a baker's dozen other ancient fancies, I lusted for this book when news of its very limited first edition reached me. When Tor come out with another edition, I lost only a little time in ordering it.
Some pieces are more like very idiosyncratic science essays, along the lines of what Isaac Asimov used to write for Fantasy and Science Fiction, dealing with silk, headhunters, the wooly mammoth, the dodo and other extinct animals, and Aleister Crowley. That last was particularly interesting to me, since most of my information about him was via Alan Moore's frothing mysticism in Promethea.
As I mentioned, Davidson's discourse wanders through a jaw-hanging forest of linguistic, literary, and historical learning, from dozens of ancient sources, but coming back quite frequently to some like Sir John Mandeville, Herodotus, and his evident favourite, Pliny the Elder, who appears in a Peregrine-esque vignette in the middle of "The Secret of Hyperborea". The legends proper yield only reluctantly to inquiry, Davidson prising apart layers of speculation, ancient and modern excesses of credulity, and sheer blarney. Some adventures are only minimally conclusive, such as for "An Abundance of Dragons" and "The Prevalence of Mermaids", or give ground an inch at a time until they're finally unravelled, like "Postcript on Prester John". Occasionally, though, one will crack right down to bedrock, as in "Who Fired the Phoenix?", which comes pretty close to pointing out one incident and saying "this is where it came from."
There's something for just about anyone, and if you have any interest in history or fantasy at all, it's well worth checking out.
