Back on June 19, I posted that I was going to tackle David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and participate in the online community Infinite SummerWell, never mind. I tried, I did, but Jesus God, that book is not for me. I couldn't find a single sympathetic character, the footnotes irritated the hell out of me (even though I love them in general ( Read more... )

I started this journal one summer when I re-read The Lord of the Rings, then turned it into a kind of review blog, and then I wandered over to Wordpress, and who the hell knows what happened then.

Well, this summer I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and I'm doing so in the company of a lot of other people over at Infinite Summer. I ( Read more... )

For a variety of reasons, I no longer post to LiveJournal. I now have a WordPress blog, with a section devoted to books, if you wish to follow me. If not, au revoir.

I read, of course, and here are some of the things I read:

My beloved lady-of-asheru gave me volume one of The Paris Review Interviews, and there is no better airport reading. Dorothy Parker is funny, Truman Capote is sly, Ernest Hemingway catty, T.S. Eliot pretentious . . . ( It's all wonderful. )

Tomorrow is Memorial Day here in the States, a holiday that originated after the Civil War. I've never been a particularly patriotic person, though I am happy and grateful to live in northern California. Despite my anger at the current administration and many of my fellow citizens, I think I'm very American in a lot of ways, most of which I ( Read more... )

Although I'm not a gardener, and in fact joke that I kill flowers when I stroll through gardens, our new place has a garden with dozens of rose bushes, so I'm spending my weekends gardening. I have scratches from rose thorns to prove it. We have a tiny, very sad lawn that I've been mowing, too, and I think I'm going to put in a couple of tomato ( Read more... )

Audiobooks:
First, ( Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner )

When I left my last job, my colleagues gave me a very generous gift certificate to a local bookstore. I've had a wonderful time using the gift certificate, which kind of kickstarted my book-buying behavior again. I try not to buy books because I already have so many and really shouldn't spend the money, but it's an addiction, I swear ( Read more... )

A few days ago, I posted in my other LJ a kind of essay about how different this December is from the last three Decembers -- and how much better. There are lots of reasons for the differences, some of which I mention, but here is another.

Pema Chodron (she has her own brief entry in Wikipedia) is a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, and has written ( Read more... )

We're moving on December 1, so we're packing. It's Thanksgiving here in the States, so I have four days off, and plan to be completely ready to move by the time I return to work on Monday. We'll see how well that goes ( Read more... )