The Unbearable Lightness of Reading

I've been dragging my feet through one of those modern books, all full of lofty suggestions of ideas, all written in the present. I hate these books, but I feel such a compulsion to read them, in order to prove (to myself) that I am literary. What a total waste of time.

Gwen sits at the computer. Dust, like fairies, swirls around the fledgling motif of grief. It lingers, touching the tips of the fine hairs at the top of her head, then plunges, desperately, into oblivion, out of the warmth of the sun. She waits, breath suspended, and finally sighs to herself, amused, disappointed. The screen door slams. She can hear the pounding of sneakers, her children's, on the doorstep. She smells the scent of grass, of the Canadian summer, the longing of the young to bound beyond the restraints she places on them.

That kind of thing. Drives me nuts. I find myself narrating my every move in this annoying fashion. I don't know why.