I really should update… the holidays are almost over, and who knows when I’ll have time to update again? I can just hear all the teachers getting geared up…they won’t leave us alone, mark my words. I can remember the second half of the final O’ level year…nightmares of unprepared exams every night, girls crying silently in the library, the tension of the farewell plans and my first fainting fit in my whole lifetime. It was terrible, terrible…and I know the final months of A’ levels are going to be double the torture. Anyways, the third day of Eid is drawing to a close now. I always turn a bit of a vegetarian around this time of the year…the first day of Eid I didn’t eat nething but a few spoonfuls of mutter pullao…I was never very partial to meat, and I grow sick just looking at all the sacrificial meat in the kitchen. Ugghh… But the holidays have been really good so far…I haven’t been very active, just read a whole lot, lazed around, and enjoyed my leisure time. Also, I’ve stopped thinking about poetry as some thing that would come on inspiration…I’ve set a target for myself to finish at least 5 poems a day…I just pull out all the unfinished stuff and work on it until ever poem has a satisfactory ending. Poetry just isn’t a romantic hobby anymore, it’s more like something I have to do, and do well. I’m almost like a poetry-making machine…that is, when I’m not reading my eyes out. Yeah, I’m reading, reading like crazy…all those books that have been recommended to me over the years, those that I’ve always wanted to read, have somehow become an obsession for me. In the last two weeks I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye, The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka),Umrao Jan Ada (the English translation), The Thirteen Problems (Agatha Christie), Jane Eyre (again), and now I’m on Wuthering Heights and my sister’s Psychology textbook simultaneously….I’m just trying to see how much I can read these holidays…just how far can this reading speed go… Before I go, however, I must say that reading Jane Eyre again was quite an experience, after having read and studied The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. For those who know the story of Jane Eyre, The Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Mr. Rochester’s lunatic wife in the attic…it’s an awesome book, even if it does give me nightmares…and Jane Eyre is just not the same once you’ve read the modern novel. It gave me the creeps, I tell you, to draw all those parallels between the two books when I was reading that classic…I felt as if it were Charlotte Bronte who was copying Rhys’ characters, and not the other way round. It’s really cool; I never thought I would enjoy reading a book again that much…