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simont

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j4.livejournal.com	Wed 2003-08-13 02:54
It may be time to start treating my sleep patterns like the weather (pack umbrella and sunblock, cross your fingers and hope for the best) rather than trying to work with it on any kind of rational basis. I've often wondered if a lot of the problems that people have with sleep are at least partly to do with the fact that we try to constrain sleep to some kind of oversimplified pattern (which usually boils down to roughly "get ~8 hours' sleep a night otherwise you will be tired the next day") when we don't fully understand the factors involved. I mean, partly that we're failing to recognise that some things affect sleep more than we think they should; and partly that our sense of guilt/obligation about sleep ("It has to fit this pattern, otherwise it's Wrong") actually hinders restful sleep. What I really want (and I've said this before, though I can't remember where) is a book that sadly doesn't exist, called "Sleep for Dummies". The book would explain the different phases of sleep, and go through all the things that can affect sleep, and generally demystify the whole process. Ho hum. ... I know everyone says Perdido Street Station was his masterpiece, but I'm not sure I didn't enjoy King Rat at least as much. Oh, I definitely enjoyed King Rat, but I do think Perdido Street Station is a more complex and more mature novel -- much more depth to it. It was interesting to see how in King Rat he's still explicitly writing about London (if a more magical London), whereas in Perdido Street Station he moves beyond that -- you can still see the influences of London on New Crobuzon (?) but it's definitely a fully realised fictional city rather than a fictionalised version of an existing city. Also in KR he's reworking existing myths; in PSS he really starts creating his own mythology. Oh, and I'd just like to say: Mornington Crescent.
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