I awoke this morning ready to kick ass. Less than an hour later, I was having my ass kicked by some stomach bug. I’ve just about decided that it was something that I ate, but as I was running a low-grade fever this morning, I decided not to pass this on to my co-workers.

When I decided that I could safely leave the house for longer than a half-hour, I headed to my local Books-A-Million and returned to a pulp fiction favorite of my youth: W.E.B. Griffin. Griffin is no master of detail—characters’ names and linguistic abilities change [most notably in The Corps series], personalities don’t always seem to line up—but yet his characterizations are always interesting, and the prose lends itself to being swiftly read. To wit: where I have certainly fallen out of the habit of reading books for long stretches in the last five years, I pounded 400 pages today like it was nobody’s business.

If you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish …