Got some book loot today: Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies and the three Principles and Practices books of Will Eisner. These made me happy on a day where things otherwise didn’t make much sense.

Can someone give me a hamburger and some french fries? Please?

Go books from Gwyn, just in time for the weekend trip too! This is also mixed with anxiety due to, as far as I know, the birthday gift to Andrea is still lost in transition. Mail should be just as fast in both directions, right? At least I think so. Perhaps it’s stolen by a thief, or classified as dangerous and awaiting FBI experts. I hope not, hope it’s just misplaced.

Anyways. Things to read!

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. So the cancer was there and now Diana Wynne Jones has died. Fuck. I do not like this at all.

I’m reading Live From New York and I came to this said by Bernie Brillstein.

[Michael] O’Donoghue had the best line about the Muppets. He used to say, “I won’t write for felt.”

And all I could think was what a sad disposition O’Donoghue had. Sure, it must have been frustrating to having to go to Jim Henson just to have the writing cleared, but at the end Jim was far weirder than any of the SNL writers. And of course I love Muppets so I’m a bit biased.

bendyroad replied to your post:Tried synchronised floor swimming. It was a huge…

Have you been reading Miranda July? She has a story about floor swimming.

That I have not. Have not read much by her at all, been meaning to for ages but I’m kind of slow sometimes. Not to mention that I get that glazed look in my eyes and always buy more books at the same time as I forget half the stuff I was there to buy in the first place. (This applies to online book shops as well.)

Just as Chelsey, I don’t reblog those reblog memes. It gets too messy too quick. But I can’t ignore the first line from favourite book thing. I just can’t. But one favourite book? One?! That’s insane. There are several, there has to be several.  So here’s a few of mine.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Two days ago I decided to kill myself.

The young captain’s hands were sticky with blood on the steering wheel as he cautiously backed the jeep in a tight turn off the rutted mud track onto a patch of level snow that shone in the intermittent moonlight on the edge of the gorge, and then his left hand seemed to freeze onto the gear-shift knob after he reached down to clank the lever upinto first gear.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face  assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

“It was my first Friday night in LA,” Laurie says in her press kit for the album.

There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show.

By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a caved canal.

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Shortly after the captain mentioned they were passing over Stornaway, that it was 45 degrees below zero outside, that they were at a height of 36,000 feet, that the weather in London was cloudy and drizzly and a good morning to all, he warned that due to a high-pressure cell over Great Britain it might be a little turbulent for the next hour or so, and after signing off—Buck, Chip, Dirk,  Biff, whatever his name was, to Lucy he sounded drunk or at best half-awake—the little seatbelt sign lit up with a ding.

Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.

From the Times July 26, 1849

A while ago Meaghano answered one of my questions:

Ha, and no, no custom dust jackets. I HATE DUST JACKETS. I have taken dust jackets off, I’ll tell you that. But it sort of feels like a betrayal to hide what book you’re reading. It’s like you have to earn the right to read it by owning up to the fact that you’re reading it. But i am Catholic so keep that in mind.

I’ve been thinking about the dust covers a bit since then. Dust jackets are kind of annoying and impossible not to throw on the drawers when you read a book. But! I also quite like the idea of having an author with a unified spine design in the bookshelf. Especially when they span over a few different publishing houses like Jonathan Lethem. I want to be able to look at a shelf and see where the authors are without having to know.

So yes, I’m thinking good paper stock, a ruler and illustrator. You think this is sad? Fuck you, I take my bookshelves seriously. If I could, I’d bend the room in more dimensions in order to get more walls to cover up with books.

A book meme

From pikkutiikeri because I like books even though memes aren’t my thing really.

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

Oh. There is no possible way I can know that. Possibly one of the green-spined youth books that my father had before me.

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

Reading the Poetics of Space (Gaston Bachelard) and the Land of Laughs (Jonathan Carroll). Finished Iorich (Steven Brust).

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?

Lord of the Rings. To Kill a Mockingbird.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

Finnegan’s Wake. Because I’m not smart enough and well, lack a few areas of expertise to be able to make sense of it.

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

I don’t. I’ll have enough books read then without planning.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

The end. Why spoil you on something that in most cases don’t even make sense?

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

Definitively not a waste. Next you’ll say dedications are a waste too and then we’d never have read the wonderful “To James Joyce, here is my latest masterpiece” penned by Flann O’Brien.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

Eh. The main character in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? He’s got a cat and spaghetti.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

Yes, some. There are old things, not up on the walls any more that reminds me of the speaker I had above the bed when I was ten. Some reminds me of train rides, bus waiting and the class I took in English Drama.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

I got a Swedish version of the Little Book of Calm, only not so little, when En Björn said “come and take books from my job.”

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

No. My life is filled with non-specialness.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers because that one is always in my bag for quite some time now.

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

Dear lord, I con’t remember much of that time at all. So no.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

Money. I sometimes put them in books because I don’t care and need a bookmark.

15. Used or brand new?

Both. A book is a book. There’s different smells to them, but that’s all. To prefer one over the other that would be… No, that’s unthinkable. As Holbrock Jackson wrote in the Anatomy of Bibliomania: “No sport so seductive, so rich in temptations, falls, repentances, so fraught with achievements and disappointments. What joy to return home after a day’s sport with your pockets bulging books!”

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

Not a genius but not as bas as opiate. He’s just uneven.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

Blade Runner. Not a bad book, but I found the movie more interesting.

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

Watchmen. That one deserved to be better than a bland miss the point ordeal. I have to agree that Jackie Earle Haley did a great Rorschach though. I blame script and the hack director. However, I think never is a too strong word. It’s this version that happened to be made that’s wrong. Book and movie are two different things, you can make wonderful things out of throw-away lines from a book (see: Blade Runner).

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Dzur! Yet again, Steven Brust, where each chapter begins at a dinner table where the food is described. He does this wonderfully and I drool just by thinking about this. (Want to try his Klava idea as well.) Also a short story by Patricia C. Wrede which contained a “Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate Cake” — recipe included.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

Jophan and En Björn.