books

I went to Borders (both stores!) today and blew a third of my monthly salary on books (thank goodness I had discount coupons haha). At Wheelock I picked up Ovid's Metamorphoses, Harold Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language (an anthology - the DH Lawrence tortoise porn anthology, Adam and ZH you'll remember...) and a box set of CS Lewis (Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, A Grief Observed, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and The Great Divorce). From the Parkway branch, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (the Vintage edition with the funky cover) and Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (extremely, extremely heretical; extremely, extremely mindblowing).

I wanted to get Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and some French lit in translation, but Oranges and Perec's Life: A User's Manual wasn't available and I didn't feel up to the challenge of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. No way. Colossal. While he waited for World War I to end he expanded Volume 2 (out of 7!) from a mere 500,000 to over a million words. Wow.

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I'm just waiting for time to dive into all this literature and be lost in wonderment. I've talked about my backlog of unread books... it's a huge stack on my table and in my bookcase. I'm an unrepentant bibliophile.

I've always loved to read. Maybe it's cos of how I blew my childhood instead of kicking ball or watching TV. Maybe it's the attraction of all the imagined worlds that you can be absorbed into, how your person can be forgotten, left behind, subsumed for an afternoon while you're out listening to the Wife of Bath or breathing in the fumes of perfumed crows in Colombia.

People don't read enough, I think, or they don't respect the pursuit of worthy literature. Something has got to be very terribly wrong if Winterson's Oranges is special order, while Jodi Picoult fills 6 - that's right, six - shelves. Well yeah, better Picoult than nothing, but still... Why don't people aspire to read better, to lift themselves out of their existences for a fleeting glance at eternity and humanity?

Well I guess I'm being a bit priggish when I suggest Pynchon is superior to Picoult. I can't say what makes for great literature, because I don't know. Craftsmanship? The use of the language? of words? The evocation of a reality and of a human existence far more substantive, more brilliant and imbued with meaning than our own?

I'm not in a position to say; all I can say is I deeply love the worlds that books construct out of nothing but ink, paper, and the finest wisps of imagination. And I'll be back to my books as soon as I can.