5.13.01

ah, yes, i apologize for allowing the gin to post last night. gin never writes things that are untrue; it just doesn’t check with me first. i have no idea when this post’ll actually go up since blogger has been about as reliable as aol lately. my impending move is finally real: the bookcases are empty and i’m surrounded by towers of boxes. damn, i have a lot of books. how did this happen? i always tell myself that i ought to start getting books from libraries, but the truth is, i love owning books. after i finish a book, it’s like a little trophy for me to put on the shelf and occasionally refer to or loan out. and the paperbacks are so pretty, compared to ugly old bound library editions. i have a moral (well, financial, really) obligation not to purchase hard cover books because they are just too expensive not to mention heavy and large. but that doesn’t mean that i won’t spend double to get the nice paperback edition rather than the cheap super-market edition if there is a choice. in college i’d always opt for the new books if the used ones actually looked used and had other people’s insipid notes in the margins.

right now i’m wading through neal stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. i just read his earlier book, Snow Crash, and really enjoyed it but i’m having a tougher time with Cryptonomicon. i think that it’s not a book that you can read in short 10 minute bursts, which is the way that i get a lot of my reading done, on bus stops and such, plus it’s about world war II, which i didn’t know before i’d started it. and i have a rule not to read literature or watch films about war, basically because contemplating how shitty humanity can be really gets me down. unfortunately i also have a rule that i always have to finish a book once i’ve started it, so i have to read it. same thing happened to me with martin amis’s Time’s Arrow the other day. an ex-boyfriend recommended it to me, and i picked it up at a used bookstore without actually knowing what it was about. now that i’ve read it, i suspect that he suggested it out of some sort of vindictive ex thing. incidentally, time’s arrow is actually an amazing book, just in that terrible sort of way. the basic premise is that it tells the store of a man, Tod T. Friendly who once was a doctor in a nazi concentration camp, who later moved to america, changed his identity, and spent the rest of his life living out the guilt of what he’d done. but here’s the hook: the story is narrated by this doppelganger, this alternate being with a separate consciousness but no physical presence, who is trapped inside Tod T. Friend’s head, condemned to live out every moment of Tod’s life backwards. as in, the book starts the moment when Tod dies, and moves backwards through life (“everyday when we finish the paper, we take it to the store”) until the moment when Tod is born. weird, upsetting shit. but there’s no doubt that martin amis’s got talent. it just might be talent that i can do without, squeamish as i am.