Absolut Absolution
The Way of a Pilgrim and Pilgrim's Progress are not the same book. Let's just get that one out of the way right now. I meant to read the former after I found out it was NOT something J. D. Salinger had made up in Franny and Zooey. But when I went to the library to look it up, I became confused, and took home the latter book, never mind that the former was mentioned BY NAME in Franny and Zooey. Now that I've realized my blunder, I am considering permananetly slamming shut Pilgrim's Progress and exchanging it for the correct book, but as I have mentioned here before, I have an unremitting hangup about quitting books once I've begun them. It doesn't matter how terrible, boring, hackneyed, illiterate, unpractically time-consuming, or otherwise undesirable they are. When I give one up I have a feeling like I have left some vulnerable orphans alone in a room with a gas leak.
True story!
Let us pause for a brief moment and remember the books of the last few months that, once begun, never benefited from the warm sunshine of my having completed them:
A Redbird Christmas, Fannie Flagg
The Republic, Plato
This Wheel's on Fire, Levon Helm
Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism, Matt Young and Taner Edis
De Anima, Aristotle
The Philosophy of History, Hegel
While I'm at it, here's a brief list of the books I have begun and subsequently quit 86 times apiece, but nonetheless vow to finish someday as they are all sitting on my shelves and which, as they communicate to one another by idly ruffling their own pages, are no doubt plotting the details of my death:
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Inferno, Dante
The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
IT TEARS ME UP INSIDE.
True story!
Let us pause for a brief moment and remember the books of the last few months that, once begun, never benefited from the warm sunshine of my having completed them:
A Redbird Christmas, Fannie Flagg
The Republic, Plato
This Wheel's on Fire, Levon Helm
Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism, Matt Young and Taner Edis
De Anima, Aristotle
The Philosophy of History, Hegel
While I'm at it, here's a brief list of the books I have begun and subsequently quit 86 times apiece, but nonetheless vow to finish someday as they are all sitting on my shelves and which, as they communicate to one another by idly ruffling their own pages, are no doubt plotting the details of my death:
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Inferno, Dante
The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
IT TEARS ME UP INSIDE.