It's been a long time -- far too long -- since I immersed myself deeply in fiction. Perhaps that sounds strange for someone who professes such a love for reading and writing, for someone who was working on a PhD in literature. It was, in all likelihood, that PhD that distanced me from both reading and writing, making them both weighty, unpleasant, laborious, a chore.

I am happy now that I can tell people when they ask me what I do for a living that I'm a writer. And I equally happy, I think, to be a reader of fiction once again.

I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest last night. I started Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things immediately afterwards. I move eagerly, hungrily from book to book, without the exhaustion of assigned readings, comprehensive exams, canonical studies.

The introduction plus three pages into Gaiman's stories, I noticed the economy of his words and caught myself studying his craft not as a scholar, but as a writer myself. I had a flash of the convoluted sentences and paragraphs I'd compose for academia; I thought about the precision of word choice demanded by my dissertation committee; I thought about semi-colons. I thought about blogging.

I've got on my long list of potential blog topics "Review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Indeed, Stieg Larsson's trilogy has been the spark for this reignited passion for fiction. It's no surprise perhaps -- a series of novels about investigative journalism, about a tattooed hacker, about trauma and promises to oneself and ferocity and revenge.

But I'm not sure how much I have to say about the novels other than "I loved them." Crime thrillers, despite my love o film noir and gangster movies, are not a genre I'm typically drawn to, I'm sure in part because of the mountains of dead women's bodies that fill the pages.

And there is violence against women in Larsson's trilogy. All the female characters, I think experience it in some form: deeply sadistic and misogynist violence. It is, after all, the world we live in outside the imagination of a novelist as well. So perhaps it's the protagonist Lisbeth Salander's passionately emotionless, fanatically disengaged commitment to justice that I like -- all that conflict between being powerless and being all-powerful and all-knowing, being stripped of one's voice and having access to the technology tools and skills to broadcast truth, to challenge authority, to kick ass.

Or maybe, it's just that after all these years feeling exhausted -- by school, by books, by words, by life -- that I finally have the energy again for imagination.