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Jeanne of "Body and Soul" on rejoicing in assassination.

book notes

I took Lloyd: What Happened back to the library unread. A satirical "novel of business", it had caught my attention in a used book store a few months ago with its use of charts and graphs to illustrate the plot. It was clever and fairly engaging, but, you know, I just left the corporate world for a while (not that PlaceWare was so very corporate). I don't need to read about it.

I've often thought that if I managed to spend less time browsing in bookstores and use that time instead to actually read, I'd be happier. The same goes for libraries, but today I figured out something. When I'm at the library, looking up books I've already picked up and put down, books I know I'm not going to check out now, I'm actually enjoying the sense of possibility--the infinite number of books I could read. Once I've settled on a book, all those other options blink (temporarily) out of existence, and I find that kind of sad.

In fact, I almost never check out a single book--I often check out two just to delay the decision about which one to read. And, of course, I jump back and forth between multiple books anyway.

Today at the library I perused three interesting picture books by Stephen T. Johnson: Alphabet City, City by Numbers, and As the City Sleeps. The first two are realistic paintings of letter and number shapes found in ordinary objects in the city; the third is sort of a collection of paintings of slightly fantastical city-at-night scenes. Fun to page through.

And I checked out The Bush Dyslexicon. The first few pages made an effort to assure me it's not just a collection of funny "Bush is dumb" quotes, so I decided to read the rest of it.

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Later I went to Shoreline Park to sit and play the guitar outside, because it was nice out. I hiked out along the lakeshore until I found a spot completely unpopulated by humans or birds, and got about four minutes of playing in before an apologetic young man wheeled up in a cart to tell me that I'd managed to stumble onto a golf course and would have to stumble back off of it. Sigh.

(Note to Kristina: On the way back I passed about a dozen chipmunks or something--and that's just the ones that were above ground. They were adorable! You would've hated it.)

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I found this quote interesting, from a Powell's interview with the (British) author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time:

I've been reading contemporary American fiction almost exclusively. I read very little British contemporary fiction. Some of it's good, but there's a kind of parochial-ness to a lot of contemporary British fiction. And there's something about America, something to do with the physical size of America… American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country. I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting. Some people do it, but it's much harder.

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Via AllConsuming, I found this post about New York architecture:

It is virtually impossible to walk into Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse without being astounded at its beauty; the high ceiling, the incredible painting on the ceiling, the sheer love that went into its creation. See if anyone can say the same about the modern Pennsylvania Station across town; a long hallway, with only one large space in the whole of it, one that is not even a tenth as large as Grand Central’s.