Great Books

I enjoy books, and my apartment is a veritable shrine to that love. I have numerous bookshelves and various other piles of books surrounding me at all times. I read almost anything: from Heller's "Catch-22" and Scott Smith's "The Ruins" to Anthony Keidis' auto-biography "Scar Tissue" and Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" -- a masterful account of Robert Moses that weighs in at over 1000 pages.

I'm a sucker for reading the great novels of recently deceased authors. Last year saw the death of Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace -- I ran out and bought "Executioner's Song," which I love by the way, but haven't plowed through to completion; this doesn't bode well for my recent purchase of DFW's "Infinite Jest," which is twice as long and infinitely more dense, but who knows...I'm a sucker for footnotes.

By the way, any good John Updike recommendations?

One article, in the recent issue of The New Yorker, augurs my hope for enjoying David Foster Wallace's magnum opus. An excerpt from DRW's unfinished final book appears over the course of four pages -- why is that important? Well, look at the first page: did you notice that there isn't a single paragraph break? When I first noticed that, before I even read the title, I thought to myself: "Wow, what a tour-de-force!" (There are six total paragraph breaks in the entire 4 page excerpt.) Wallace's unfinished novel, as it was revealed in the preceding article, is about a local chapter of the I.R.S. on the local level -- but, on a global level, his novel is about boredom. The daily, hourly and very tedious and repetitive tasks that take just the slightest amount of thought, but require very little effort are the star characters in this excerpt.

"He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow, unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat, and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners near him had heard it or were looking at him."

Those of you working in a cubicle must empathize, right? It's hard for me to say, but I can certainly imagine...