“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.
![Whaa, who’s going to buy me this for my birthday?
This bookchair/pushcart by Nils Holger Moormann offers a comprehensive reading experience: not only can it hold around 80 paperbacks in the arms and backrest, it also sports a reading lamp and hidden drawers for writing equipment. [Link]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0brx39fZT1qzvsijo1_400.png)
Whaa, who’s going to buy me this for my birthday?
This bookchair/pushcart by Nils Holger Moormann offers a comprehensive reading experience: not only can it hold around 80 paperbacks in the arms and backrest, it also sports a reading lamp and hidden drawers for writing equipment. [Link]
Powell’s treasures:
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah
Next by James Hynes
Not pictured is Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross, as my brother started it on the train. Also not pictured is about ten books I put back, why I did that I’m not sure.
I haven’t written a book review in sometime. What I’m writing now won’t be a review either, but I feel I must say a little something about it.
I’ve know about Flannery O’Connor for years. Without reading a word of her’s, I’ve always been on the lookout for her books, on the shelves of stores, I spend time in. I have acquired most of her work now, but Wise Blood was my first experience with her writing.
I’ve never been to the South, probably never will, but I’ve always been fascinated by authors who write about It. The area just feels so intriguing. Wise Blood had this haunting characteristic throughout. What struck me most about O’Connor’s writing was how something like, driving over someone in a car, is the same as someone walking down the street. Something that should be horrible, isn’t. There’s a ton of horrible in this novel, but it never felt like it. The sense of humor as well. I was laughing at things I probably shouldn’t have been. I’m sure written by any other author I wouldn’t have been. That rhymes.
I felt kind of dumbfounded after finishing Wise Blood. I saw Drive earlier this week, and after I walked out of that movie I felt dumbfoundly (not a word) awesome. Like I had finally seen, after a long wait, a good piece of cinema. Wise Blood wasn’t like that, it was entirely different, but I felt something. That’s what I love about great literature, feeling something.
To many books on bookshelves, means exhausting decisions on what to read next.
Edit: book cut off in photo is William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.
Any ideas.?
Edit x 2: I actually have hundreds of choices, these are the first five that caught my eye.
Juilet Lapidos asked her friends, authors, critics to confess their least favorite “must read.”
My blog/tumblr has turned into nothing. It’s become a bike with a flat tire. It’s become what I’ve become creatively, which is, creatively dead.
I looked through my archives the other night and wasn’t surprised at what I saw. A random post here, something I’m listening to on vinyl there. Nothing of any substance, just posts to feed the parking meter.
Whether we like it or not our blogs are a reflection of our lives. When things are going well, are blogs explode with fireworks, unicorns and rainbows. When life is at a standstill our blogs diminish into pointlessness, and abstract nothingness.
There’s nothing wrong with this I suppose, I’m just always amazed at how our Internet lives mirror the real lives we’re living.
I don’t treat my blog like a ‘Dear Diary’. My God, did I use to and those that have followed me for years can attest to that. These days I just don’t know what this is all about. Just like my life.
Case in point, I’m reading a Fantasy novel right now Patrick Rothfuss ‘The Name of the Wind’. A Fantasy novel. I haven’t read Fantasy since I was a fourteen year old boy, living in the worlds Piers Anthony was creating. Not only that, I went into the bookstore the other day and went straight to the SciFi/Fantasy section, and get this, didn’t go near Fiction or Literature. On top of all that I’m in love with this book.
This is life. There’s more of course, that I’m not telling you, but blogs=real lives, and this is what mine looks like at this moment.
I picked up a couple of new books today. Boring, yes, ahuh. What makes picking up these two books a little bit different, is how I went about acquiring them. I bought them, on a website called Amazon. I think they’re a pretty big deal on the internet. Again, boring. Millions of people buy books on Amazon, so I’m told. I’d just never done so before.
I love bookstores you all know that. The experience of looking at books, and feeling the front and back covers is one I cherish. Completely cornball I know. For some reason, I decided to look at books on Amazon the other night. Tom McCarthy’s C I’ve wanted since it’s release but the sticker price was just too rich for my blood. But Casey you just bought The Pale King new. Yes this is true but I only buy a new book, when the need for the book new, out ways the thought of spending thirty plus dollars on it. Okay back to my story, which is unbelievably boring. So there it was C in hard cover form used for six dollars. Six dollars, how can that be possible. This book was read once tops. I could go down to a bookstore and put it on the shelf and they’d never know the difference. But why would I do that, that’s plain stupid. My point being is, I bought a book which is virtually new and I never left my couch. Oh and the book was six dollars.
The other book I found, I had never heard of, until I read David Foster Wallace’s Overlooked article in Salon, from 1999. In it he lists five direly underappreciated U.S. novels>1960. This book was one of them and David Foster Wallace described it this way:
“This won some big prize or other when it first came out, but today nobody seems to remember it. “Steps” gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.”
Those few sentences peaked my interest and there I was on Amazon, pressing click, and poof the book was on it’s way to me. For a $1.75. Buying books online is not something I’m completely onboard with. It takes away from the experience of going to the bookstore. But if I went to my favorite used bookstore, I wouldn’t have found these books. So I guess…………………..there you have it.
