lots of parentheses
I walked into one of the local libraries and into the teen space to find someone staring at me. I did the classic doubletake, and was embarrased to find that it was a lifesize cardboard cutout of Legolas. So, for everyone around here, if you want to curl up with a book next the (heartthrob?) Orlando Bloom, it's possible! Fully possible! (Of course, he can't be seduced, though if you try and succeed in seducing the paper model... applause.)
The library system here appears to be without any other books by the eccentric Will Christopher Baer than the sequel to the chronicle of Phineas Poe. Figures. Jump in in the middle, and hope Jude isn't essential. And that's why the first book is about her, as far as I know. Great. (Off to the bookstore!)
Too lazy to look up the author to The Lovely Bones, I instead pick up the only book by Pynchon the library had. It looks suspiciously like Undaunted Courage, in that it's insanely thick and about explorers. Then again, I figured, it's Pynchon, not Ambrose, and couldn't be that bad. Deciding against carrying a book with that size around town all day, I put it back, and there's another one on the unofficial, unwritten list of everything I have to read before I die. (And if I die tomorrow, I'm in trouble.)
So, at last, on one of those nifty book displaying plastic contraptions, there was The Judges by Elie Wiesel. I expected it to be about the Nuremberg trials, but not at all. (At least not directly... who's up for discussion?) I snatched it up and huddled with it in a beanbag chair in the teen space, and was again reminded of a statement my old history teacher was notorious for: intellectual orgasm. Oh, god! says the high school. Hah, this old guy said orgasm! Orgasm! Isn't that funny! Intellectual orgasm! You know the story. That crazy guy. Blech, school, intellect! (Forgive the exaggeration.) But truly, the sinister tone of The Judge and the questions posed by Wiesel... incredible. The wise mixing of the words. I smiled, and hoped the other patrons in the library would forgive the intense pleasure a young girl was having in the corner of the library.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book. If you can stand an unrelenting barrage of philosophical queries and consider such an overflow to be more of a "it's raining men" or a lifetime's supply of chocolate than an attack, read it! (And then find me and we'll discuss meanings of life, death, guilt, innocence, messiahs... oh, the wonders!)
I leave you with one of (many of) my favorite passages:
"It's all the same struggle: for or against the light. For it to break through or to fade."