Books being read

Currently: 

William Gay, The Long Home. My yard has this really thick thatch of grass to it, so much so that when I go to dig a hole, I have to put the fullness of my weight on the shovel to break through the dense outer woven complexity to get to the dirt I need, or rather, to the emptiness of dirt that I need. There are points I feel the same way with The Long Home, that his sentences are such intricate wonders that there is little point trying to cut through them, but then I keep digging and the dirt underneath is black and loamy and infinitely fertile. I would like to walk William Gay up to Faulkner and say, "See?" but they are both dead, so what can you do? Dig up the whole yard, I guess.

Joe Bonomo, This Is Where My Obsession with Infinity Began.  Joe and I are friends in he modern media sense in that we like he same things and each others' on pushbutton networks. I've interviewed him and reviewed his books on Jerry Lee Lewis  and AC?DC. Now, I am picking through his book of quick, illuminative essays on the self and the not-self and origins and ends. Each one is a sharp little acupuncture needle that touches a part of your consciousness in a way that charges it, relaxes it, does something to it.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I'm reading it on my phone. I mentioned this in a profile they did on me in in the paper and a friend commented that reading Infinite Jest on your phone is the dumbest idea he'd ever heard and he's likely right. I finished neither Anna Karenina nor Ulysses on this same phone, why should I expect to finish this one.?There was some weird sale where it was $1 for Kindle so I have it ostensibly forever. You know he wrote a book actually about infinity, right? It is of readable length and, for a book about higher math, weirdly sad.  It hit me the way Nirvana's In Utero does, everything sounded a but like a suicide note. Anyway, it is a nice bout of futility to be on IJ's page 27 of 1027 that lulls me right on to sleep when the light is out and a glowing book is a fellow of most excellent fancy. 1

On deck:

Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes. I checked it out from the library for a bro of mine and then never caught up with said bro, leaving it hissing in my backpack like the snakes in the book, and then he got his own copy, so I'll read it again. We'll have our own little bro book club and shut up, it's a totally normal thing for bros to do.

1. See what I did there?