Three years of law school teaches you many things, but chief among them seems to be how to avoid things prodigiously.
How to avoid drawing attention to yourself in such a way that you wind up being called on, how to avoid doing the monumental readings, how to avoid saying anything with an opinion attached to it that will have the professor constantly coming back to you, the special kid with all the answers, for this Man on the Street remark. How to avoid staying at the school too long, how to avoid paying for groceries (noon meetings are guaranteed to have food), how to avoid having a life altogether because you’re in law school, and there’s nothing else to do.
But now I’m not in law school, and I’m trying to figure out how to regain some normalcy. I used to devour novels, and for a long time all I did was devour cases, footnotes, and articles–with a healthy mix of everything on Tumblr and reddit. My attention span has shrunk, which scares me; I have little tolerance for anything other than skimming. What would be appropriate and helpful is to start with a small novel, something easy to get my confidence back.
Instead, I’m going to start with War and Peace, the Vintage Classics annotated edition. We ride.
