--I'm reading Haruki Murakami's After Dark. It's the first book of his I've read. It's good. Not thick and difficult, but definitely thought-provoking, which is kind of a relief; it's been all one or the other for me for the last six months. Nice to find a literary writer whom I cotton to.
--...especially after investing 90 pages into Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All, which was crap. This is strike three for me & Chuck. Critics generally didn't like Tell-All either, so I'm thinking I'm going to give Choke or Lullaby a go, just to give him a third swing that's actually meaningful. But I'm willing to bet that I won't like him then, either; there were bits of Tell-All that reminded me of the stuff I didn't like about the other books of his I read. Specifically, that he manages to include irritatingly excruciating detail and still leave me with almost no idea of what really occurred in a given scene or chapter.
--I'm also reading John Dies at the End in between other stuff, which is by turns totally delightful and overly outlandish. Like, outlandish beyond delightful and into "Um, are you sure you had an editor?" It's already been made into a movie which I'm looking forward to a lot, but the tone of the trailer is entirely opposite the tone of the book. A little like this. Facts are all there, tone is radically different.
It's near about time for me to change out the pictures on my pinboard; they've stopped being awesome and started being visual background noise. So I wanted to note here what they were as of today. Marlene and Salvatore I've already talked about, and I also had this picture up to remind me conceptually of KUFC's main character when I'm writing about her.
There's also this one:
The Great Gatsby was one of the first books of adolescence that really bewitched me, and I spent a lot of time and energy reading Fitzgerald in my early teens. And writing about thinly disguised teenagers arguing over how awesome Fitzgerald was. Thank God that stuff has mostly been lost. This is on my board for lots of reasons, but one jokey reason is that Dr. Eckleburg knows when I'm procrastinating instead of writing.
And this:
To remind me that human life is almost never exactly as it's been recorded. I love pictures of Victorians smiling (and thank goodness there are more of them than you'd think), because really, people have always lived in the same world we live in now, and there's the proof.
And this:
Not quite the same picture, but close enough. This is where I got married. There's a lot more about this place that's inspiring to me, but it'd take all day to explain.
And then there's this:
I am a visually oriented person, and I love looking at things - especially attractive or interesting things - more than I can really put into words. This image is one of my favorite things I've ever seen. You can't imagine how happy I was to find it in postcard form in a box during our move in June; I thought I'd lost it forever.
There's also a picture of a happy dog in a field, but I'm not planning to take that one down. It does make me feel a bit guilty every time I look at it, because it's the front of a card that was actually sent to Matt, not me, by his aunt and uncle. I just love stealing his stuff.
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