Silence

In April of 2008 I had the rug pulled out from under me. My already weak career trajectory took a sharp turn. I was no longer employed in publishing. Everything I wanted, my entire adult life, became completely unreachable to me. And for a couple weeks, I stopped reading. I couldn't do the one thing that I'd always done well. Picking up a book made me want to vomit. My entire life was different.

The first book I opened, when I could make my eyes work again, was The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Yeah, I wasn't in a great mood.

Eventually, I went back to reading fiction, but it's no longer the passion it was. It's simply instinctive now. I can't blog about books anymore, because as soon as I finish them, they slide off me, like dollar-store fridge magnets.

The weird part about all this, is the number of books I have read this year; it's actually up from last year. Even with the two-week blackout. Maybe because I'm not thinking anymore, just devouring.

So here's the 2008 list of the 58 books I read.

A Woman of Excess, of Zeal and Greed

I'm a bit scattered today, so here's a bunch of almost point-form bits and pieces that have a vague theme. Not so much on the witty commentary.

Picked up Lost Girls and Love Hotels after reading a review on That Shakespeherian Rag, and tore through it in about two days. Excellent debut novel about hopelessness, and the hedonism that arises from it. There is a "love" story in the novel, but it doesn't seem tacked on in an effort to conform with expected female narratives. Rather it seemed to be an extension of the free-fall the protagonist is in. Love, too, is a drug, and the more illicit, the better the high.
The American cover is hideous, and I'd have never given this novel a chance if it looked like that. Yeah yeah, book by its cover, but Lost Girls and Love Hotels isn't miso-flavoured chick-lit, and the U.S. cover leads you there. I just looked at the reader reviews on Amazon, and the first one complains about the cover too.

Laura Albert, of J.T. LeRoy infamy, is profiled in the New York Times.
"[...]I never really thought of it in terms of right or wrong, truth or lie. It was more like two computer programs running in my head. There was him, and there was me."

In the last post, I wondered where I could smoke that cigarette indoors. Turns out smoking bans might be killing English literature. (The comments are also worth a look.) I know the bans killed a lot of pool halls and sketchy bars, but literature? Hey, I'll go for that.

Bookninja linked to this footage of Anne Sexton reading her poetry. Anne's been with me through some of the craziest times, though I was warned against reading her during those times ("Don't feed your crazy!").
No one was crazy like Anne, bless her art.


The title of this post is a line from "Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women".