I am pleasantly surprised by the speed and level of retention for details for the books I'm reading since Christmas vacation started.

The other day, I finally finished Atonement by Ian McEwan. P. lent me her copy two years ago but since I had, at the time, my aversion-to-thick-books button on, I just let it gather dust and returned the poor book to her mistress with a I-don't-have-the-time-to-read fib.

So all it took was a cheaper, thinner version of Atonement? I don't think so. I have to admit it's my short attention span. Not to mention my insistence on leaving the TV on when I read. Which is not really helpful if I want to get things done. But that's how I've operated since I was a kid.

But realizing my newfound second wind in reading for long periods of time (and actually remembering what I read), I decided to take on a book I've also left to rot in my bookshelves - The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

And wonder of wonders, the reading just glides like a giddy girl on Rockefeller Plaza.

Is it the weather? Is it a long-overdue reunion with novels? And not just a school-requirement reunion but an honest-to-goodness reunion, with all the accoutrements - undivided attention and not nodding your head at scheduled paces in order to keep appearances; playing and replaying scenes and lines in your head, shaking them, stretching them, peering at them.

For instance, I find it amazing that this time around, I finally felt the isolation of each Lambert family member, that while all this that is taking place around them that is part of the drudgery called family, this gnawing mist is totally disconnected to their individual selves. That this is - hold our breaths now as we participate in yet another pronunciation of an already-abused word - dysfunction at its dripping finest.

How strange and amazing to find out that I am, still, and more crucially, after all, shamelessly hungry for novels, a genre I thought I'd confine myself to requisite reading for class.

With this second wind, I am already lining up book titles to read over the vacation. And since I already started with Jonathan Franzen, let's bring out the supposedly hip American writers parade, shall we? That would probably mean Dave Eggers (and finally finish that dang A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and Douglas Coupland (to add to American dysfunction, All Families Are Psychotic). Never mind Tama Janowitz, she's so 80's. (!) Will not touch, however, the king of them all, Bret Easton Ellis. My second wind hasn't turned out to be a tornado, you know.