I’ve been reading again, Jeffrey Eugenides’ new book The Marriage Plot and David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion. Eugenides is probably my favorite contemporary author. If you haven’t read Middlesex, you should. It’s fantastic. Wallace makes my head hurt though. Every time I read him I feel like the joke’s on me. It’s like hanging out with your genius friend and struggling to stay in the conversation, laugh at the right time, you know. But I keep trying to read him because I don’t like giving up on things.
And oh how I love when books actually make me laugh out loud.
After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something — anything. The House of Mirth, Daniel Deronda — to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.
Bought tix for Polica and Nada Surf tonight. Still not sure about the Darkness, I can’t make up my mind…
