pynchon, lewis, wallace, byat

i'm still reading, you know.
just very, very slowly.
my commute is now 100% by bicycle,
which doesn't leave much time for reading,
and apparently it's not important enough for me to actually go and Make time in the rest of my life for it.

anyhow.

the surprise:
i can't stand Pyncon! After 46 pages i've lumped him in with whomever wrote The Illuminati thing.
A quick quote from The Crying of Lot 49 may exemplify:

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypdermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

- basically the shit i am giving is very, very small.

Too many commas, a tedious and dangerously top-heavy metaphore, and basically a set of obsessions (drugs & sex) which i have pretty much no interest in reading fiction obessed with.

kai jsut handed me um The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. With a recommendation. So maybe that will save me.

I was bummed to discover that Pynchon, one of the greats, is someone i can't stand.

Wallace: A supposedly fun thing i'll never do again- going good. actually it's going excellent but fear of a broken-record appearance keeps me from saying more.

Lewis: Rereading/watching The Lion/Witch/Wardrobe. Appreciating much more than ever before the influences of Tolkien on Lewis. (They were literally best buds)

A.S. Byatt: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye - A book of short new fairy stories which i loved until the title story which is rather postmodern.