Telling the truth, helplessly

Obviously, not a lot of blogging is getting done. I am reading a lot though, mostly because I am reading to avoid spending time on set texts for my class. How will this affect my final essay? Who can tell.


I have almost finished Sloane Crosley's latest collection of essays, How Did You Get This Number. I love good writing about the mundane (or not-so-mundane - I guess not everybody has run over a bear in a car full of bridesmaids) bits and pieces of everyday life. Imagine a younger, midwestern-but-now-New-Yorker, female David Sedaris. Anyone who uses the phrase "I was going to get the shit smote out of me" is fine by me.

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone

Going on holidays has killed my blog momentum (and trying to read postmodernist Mexican literature (at least, that's what I think it is) that isn't really to my taste has killed my reading momentum).

I will say though, that these are my favourite non-fiction books, and Franzen is probably my favourite non-fiction writer.



[Charles] Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life - to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make.

There is such tenderness to his writing, and clarity, even when he writes about his own doubt or guilt or failure to understand. It has been a while since I read How to be Alone but his essays on the Chicago post office and reading William Gaddis (a novelist who I am sure I will never actually be capable of reading) are still vivid in my mind.

Read these books, they will make you feel good about having a brain.