What Friends Are For Wednesday

What I've Finished Reading

( Alfred Kazin and Dorothy Dale )

I finally got around to reading 2001: A Space Odyssey, the book version. It was all right! My favorite thing about it was the astronaut David Bowman (only the computer calls him Dave) meticulously shaving himself every day on the long journey to Saturn’s moons, because now that his crew have all been killed, he is the sole ambassador of the human race. You don't want to make a scrubby impression! Then he journeys through sufficient weirdness to turn him into a magical baby waiting in the sky, who would like to come and meet us but thinks he’ll blow our minds. At least, I think that's what happened. This sort of thing is not really my thing, but it was nicely lucid (confusing baby transformation aside) and excellent for reading on the plane.

What I'm Reading Now

For 99 Novels: The Assistant. A defeated shopkeeper is robbed at gunpoint at the end of a bad day, and one of the "holdupniks" cracks him over the head with a pistol. While he's recovering from the head injury, a hapless-looking young man starts hanging around the store, claiming that he wants grocery experience and offering to work for free. Mundane sadness turns to suspense and mystery by an apparently inevitable process. The truth about the assistant comes out early on and isn't hard to guess, but you should read it for yourself anyway. This is a good book about how difficult it is to do the right thing, and it's stressing me out. I keep wanting to knock it against the wall in hopes of knocking some sense into the characters, though it's been made perfectly clear that sense isn't the problem.

Appointment With Death by Agatha Christie is also an intense reading experience, but the nature of the mystery is easier to articulate. It's "which of this unambiguously loathsome woman's children killed her for the good of the family?" Lots and lots of predictably brittle family drama with one or two unexpected elements. The presence of a Renowned Psychologist and his protege means we are treated to a bucketload of midcentury psychoanalysis at every turn, but it doesn't hurt the plot any. I suspect that I've already guessed the real killer from one very noticeable bit of clue-burying - but I've been burned by Christie's sneaky construction methods before.

What I Plan to Read Next

I managed to turn away the temptation to run out and buy The Golden House after reading an interview with Salman Rushdie, and instead got it from the library, using the hold system so that I wouldn't have to keep coming back to check if it was there. This is a simple system, but until now I've been too lazy to do it. But I saved at least ten dollars, which I can now use to buy more books for groceries and other responsible pursuits.