What I Haven't Been Reading

Here are some books I haven't been reading this week. In fact, these are books that I haven't opened in awhile. Some I started reading over a year ago. I used to be the kind of person who would pick up a book and force myself through to the final sentence no matter what. I finished books so boring that they put me to sleep not only at night, but at random times during the day when the books were miles away. I could be doing something exciting, like saran-wrapping a toilet seat, when I'd accidentally think about The Law of Similars and boom I'd be asleep on the bathroom floor. I finished books so poorly written that the mechanics of my own speech and writing would be completely demolished. After finishing Along Came a Spider I couldn't arrange a complex sentence for months, and .


I am no longer that kind of person. Often, I don't finish reading the synopsis on the back of the book. I'm thirty. I have little time to waste. So, unfortunately, sometimes even books that are pretty okay, I'm sure, don't get read. These are all pretty okay books, but I think I'm done with them.

Something Said was really pretty good, and I like what Sorrentino has to say about poetry (mostly William Carlos Williams' poetry). Finally, though, I could more or less shrug it off, despite being a fan of Sorrentino's fiction.


Tests of Time was perhaps a poorly chosen title, as I caught myself counting the pages in each essay and ask myself, Okay, how long will this one take? Too long. As I read the first 2/3 of this book, I could hear my body decaying. This sound distracted me terribly.

There are about seven pages of the The Brothers Karamazov that you should read. I didn't find any of them in the first two hundred. Ask someone else to point them out. Ask someone who's wearing fur and making exclamations such as "Deuce take it!" and "Ach!" and "I am in great fury!"

And finally, I'll admit to starting Freedom only because I felt like ripping something entirely mediocre to shreds. However, the book nearly euthanized me. It's basically a literary Rufie. I honestly have no memory of the sixteen hours following my reading attempt. This a video that shows where I'd like to keep my copy of this book. I snuck my copy onto the bookshelf of a friend, but he noticed immediately and now we are in litigation.

Obviously the title is a reference to the Mel Gibson Movie Braveheart, as is the bird with the half-blue face on the cover. So derivative.