It’s midterms time and I am suffering from severe senioritis. A wise man once said that time is “a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey… stuff.” He meant it in the way of scientific fact, but when I survey my life right now that’s exactly how it feels.

Two weeks ago, I read Lorrie Moore’s short story collection “Bark” but didn’t have time to write about it. In the interim my time has been consumed by my honors thesis (on the hierarchy of assignments that won’t write themselves, the honors thesis is the most damning) and class reading (Dear Teachers: Please stop assigning Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” This is the second time in a year I’ve had to read it! I love it in ten-page sips, not the 100-page chug-sessions I’ve been drowning in so far! GAHHHhhh!!) And when I’m not doing schoolwork, I’ve entered a dangerous stage of my life in which the 90s rom-com speaks directly to the deepest recesses of my soul. I’ve been revisiting the Julia Roberts canon and blame it on “Notting Hill.”

Okay fine, so most of this is my own fault.

But I’m back on track! One thing that I’ve found particularly hard about the act of reading in general is that I have a massive attention span problem. I can’t get through ten pages of any book without checking Twitter or Facebook, and if someone texts me when I’m in the middle of the page I have to respond immediately. Because I mean, what if someone has brought me queso and will only deliver it to me if I respond at that very moment?! It’s possible! The moment must be seized! Cheesed! But anyways, I’ve tried to stymie the urge to be on my phone 24/7 by deleting the Twitter app and putting my phone on Airplane Mode while reading. It makes it a lot easier to immerse myself in a story, which consequently makes the book more enjoyable.

But onto Lorrie Moore. She’s my favorite writer, and this week I read her novel “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital.” She’s the 30th Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence and will read at 7 p.m. on Mar. 2 in the Kendall Cram Room. The event is free and open to the public.

One of the things I love about Lorrie Moore is that her writing is focused and strange. Within any Lorrie Moore turn of phrase, she’s going for the deepest cut. Every page feels like a risk, like she’s playing with high stakes in language, plot development, characterization, etc. My favorite stories, personally, are those that make you feel like you’ve entered a completely different world, looking at it inside a stranger’s head, and everything in the world has a specific cadence and texture that you never could have felt on your own. I like strangeness. I like risks. Therefore, I LOVE Lorrie Moore.

Moore wrote “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital” in 1994, and it’s vastly different than the short stories in “Bark,” which she published in 2014. In a moment of blasphemy to myself, I’m going to say that “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital” was disappointing. Perhaps it’s because I read Moore’s later material first, and her short stories are so laser-focused and peculiar. “Frog Hospital” was the kind of book that I would have loved maybe a year or two ago. It’s not that it was a bad book, it just didn’t have the restraint that Moore’s later work displays. In the book, a woman in an unhappy marriage looks back on her childhood friend Sils. The two work in a theme park and navigate adolescence, tumultuous relationships, and the peculiarities of being a young person on the cusp. It was a satisfying read, but perhaps a little bit too tidy.

“Bark,” in contrast, is also very neat but has staggering confidence, subtlety and restraint. At this point in her thirty-year career, Lorrie Moore doesn’t need to impress anybody. We know she’s staggeringly brilliant, witty, sharp, strange, and so “Bark” doesn’t rely as heavily on her old tricks. It made numerous Best of 2014 lists, and though it’s not as dazzling as her previous bestselling collection of short stories “Birds of America,” it is quieter and more damning.

Lorrie Moore gets a lot of flack for being so pun-obsessed, but it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I kind of love it. The puns and general laughs were scaled back here, but it didn’t make it any less memorable or fun.

The thing that struck me about reading these books back-to-back was how different they were — they demonstrated a writer at such different points of her life and career. I can say that I prefer one kind of book or style over another. But it feels like when you say you like someone in college more than you did in middle school. Their college-self doesn’t negate their middle school-self, and I can love all the parts of them in distinct singular ways. I love the Lorrie Moore that wrote “Bark” right now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love the earlier stages of her as well. It’s just that she’s a different person writing in a different place and, who knows, maybe in a few years I’ll love it just as much.

Next week: Deepstep Come Shining – C.D. Wright