2006
no music in my head right now, just words words words
maura @ 10:10 pm
Jonathan bought us each a fun book for our week off. At first I was kind of annoyed, because they’re new (= hardcover, which is so heavy + space-sucking) and I’ve been trying to get us on the path of borrow from the library first, then buy only what we love (for money + space reasons). But I have to say, there’s nothing like opening up a pretty, fresh, tasty new book. The creamy paper, the embossed spine, the promise within. Yum, yum, yum. I couldn’t wait and started reading mine today, and it is really really good.
I’ve been fairly gorging on fiction since finishing my pop stat book* a few weeks ago. Last week I read Saturday, which was okay. I mean, he’s a good writer, and the tense bits were tense, but in the end it left me kind of eh. Which is not what I expected from a book that made all the top 10 lists last year.
* Oooh, be impressed! At least until I reveal that I skipped over the pages full of equations, that is. Then you can lose all respect for me whatsoever.
But on the other hand, Steven Millhauser, where have you been all my life? He had a story in the New Yorker a few months ago, which Jonathan ripped out for me to read (I don’t usually read the fiction in the New Yorker, having been disappointed too often). And it was fantastic, in the true sense of the world. Very much like Borges. So I casually looked him up on Amazon one day and woah, he’s written zillions of things! Right now I’m reading Little Kingdoms (SO good), and I have Martin Dressler out from the library too.
How could we have missed him? Some of his stuff seems to have come out in our post-college first-round-of-grad-school days, when all I read was anthropology and Douglas Coupland, I think. But Martin Dressler won the Pulitzer in 1997 — where the hell was I? Probably toiling too late in the early new media trenches (and partying in indiepopland), but still, that’s no excuse.
Classes start up again next week, so I’ve only got a bit longer to fatten myself up solely on inventive narrative. Chomp, chomp.
