Reading Stinks

The other day the thought occurred to me that I might have become eldery enough to start reading John le Carré. I asked around among some friends, and Ace boasted that he had started reading le Carré at the age of fifteen. Ace was already elderly at the time! That's my conclusion. Anyway, as you know, I have been reading ancient (as opposed to elderly) things, or about ancient things, for quite a while now, so when I picked up John le Carré from the bedside table last night and read (I paraphrase lazily), "The stock market was troubled in Zurich," or something like that, my immediate reaction was "Zzzzzz," because I had fallen fast asleep after two paragraphs. But it's not John le Carré's fault! Or maybe it is. I mean, on Halloween, I was finishing up Seneca's plays and reading stuff like "They say the spirits groan here in the dead of night, the grove resounds with the clattering of chains, and the ghosts howl... Old tombs break open, releasing hordes of wandering dead." You try going from that to the Zurich stock market.