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evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
I didn't mean to read all of Rabbit, Run at one go - in fact, I had a time-sensitive task that I was supposed to be working on. But it's one of those books with huge chapters broken into short sections, and it was all too easy to get to the end of one section and have just one more, and so on. I kept giving myself breaks to read "just one" and every time my Internet access went out, I'd spend half an hour reading Rabbit, Run before trying to fix it.
There's a big white space at the bottom of the last page, where the previous owner of the book has written the words SELFISH BASTARD in blue pen. That about sums it up. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was the star of his high school basketball team, almost a decade ago. At seventeen he was the center of a small but dazzling universe; now he's a twenty-six-year-old child terrified of middle age. He tries to run away from his problems, but life's not a movie and it's not a basketball game either, there's no triumph song or victory whistle; it just keeps going. I don't know if this is a perfect book - the tragedy gets sliced a little thick sometimes - but it's a memorable one.
What I'm Reading Now
A mishmash of things from my TBR stack. I've got a first-grade hygiene textbook from 1908 and a Spurgeon Colportage Library tract from [unknown date] with two stories of pious children and their happy deaths. One of the doomed children, Little Dot, strikes up a friendship with a lonely gravedigger and brightens the graves by throwing daisies in them. She becomes fascinated by a little girl's grave and spends a great deal of time imagining the dead girl and wondering what she was like, and this posthumous friendship leads to her conversion by the girl's family - just in time for her own death, as it happens.
Blue Highways is a book that I hated when I was assigned it in high school. I hated it so much and with so little apparent cause that I've spent the last twenty years convinced that there must be something very good about it. I've finally gotten around to reading it again. So far, it's ok! It's a nonfiction account of one man's attempt to make a circuit of the continental US on the smallest roads possible. He builds a bed into the back of an Econoline van and heads east from Missouri. The year is 1978. I'll probably enjoy the tour even if I never warm to the guy (William Least Heat-Moon, who would rather die of food poisoning than eat a franchised burger - I sympathize, but I wish he had a little more sympathy for the greasy spoon-averse).
What I Plan to Read Next
The April issue of Poetry is here! Also here: more books than I need, probably.
I didn't mean to read all of Rabbit, Run at one go - in fact, I had a time-sensitive task that I was supposed to be working on. But it's one of those books with huge chapters broken into short sections, and it was all too easy to get to the end of one section and have just one more, and so on. I kept giving myself breaks to read "just one" and every time my Internet access went out, I'd spend half an hour reading Rabbit, Run before trying to fix it.
There's a big white space at the bottom of the last page, where the previous owner of the book has written the words SELFISH BASTARD in blue pen. That about sums it up. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was the star of his high school basketball team, almost a decade ago. At seventeen he was the center of a small but dazzling universe; now he's a twenty-six-year-old child terrified of middle age. He tries to run away from his problems, but life's not a movie and it's not a basketball game either, there's no triumph song or victory whistle; it just keeps going. I don't know if this is a perfect book - the tragedy gets sliced a little thick sometimes - but it's a memorable one.
What I'm Reading Now
A mishmash of things from my TBR stack. I've got a first-grade hygiene textbook from 1908 and a Spurgeon Colportage Library tract from [unknown date] with two stories of pious children and their happy deaths. One of the doomed children, Little Dot, strikes up a friendship with a lonely gravedigger and brightens the graves by throwing daisies in them. She becomes fascinated by a little girl's grave and spends a great deal of time imagining the dead girl and wondering what she was like, and this posthumous friendship leads to her conversion by the girl's family - just in time for her own death, as it happens.
Blue Highways is a book that I hated when I was assigned it in high school. I hated it so much and with so little apparent cause that I've spent the last twenty years convinced that there must be something very good about it. I've finally gotten around to reading it again. So far, it's ok! It's a nonfiction account of one man's attempt to make a circuit of the continental US on the smallest roads possible. He builds a bed into the back of an Econoline van and heads east from Missouri. The year is 1978. I'll probably enjoy the tour even if I never warm to the guy (William Least Heat-Moon, who would rather die of food poisoning than eat a franchised burger - I sympathize, but I wish he had a little more sympathy for the greasy spoon-averse).
What I Plan to Read Next
The April issue of Poetry is here! Also here: more books than I need, probably.
