biblioteca

Jose Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons is even lovelier than Javier Cercas' Speed of Light, not that there's any reason to compare them. except maybe for the fact that those are the only two books in recent memory that have taken me less than a day to devour, and that they both, in their own very different ways, deal with the surreal, the reliability of the unreliable: memories and perspectives and 'truths', not to mention Histories and violence; and that they were, less 'importantly'(?), both translations...

discovering the (public) library has been -- most certainly -- a good thing. i've actually finished reading more books in the past couple months since i got my membership than i would normally have in half a year accumulating shoring for my shelves.

for the curious and incurably bibliomaniacal, here's the score on my library card:

Children of the Albatross by Anais Nin
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
Speed of Light by Javier Cercas
The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic
The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

only now i find myself with an unchanging pile of unread books i actually own...

still slogging through Einstein's Relativity, which is turning out to be a tougher read than i expected, and John Nash's dissertation on Non-cooperative Games, the latter provided by my good friend E. Cross Saltire. (who, incidentally, has been saying some very sensible things over at nontrivialpursuit; as can only be expected, NtP is really shaping up into something i really think people would really do better paying attention to than not. really.)

Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme rounds things out nicely, for the moment, i think, something off my own library.

not much solace for You in any of that, is there? but i hope it helps that i feel that, in some small way, things are actually getting better for me here, and i'm pretty sure it'll all be 'good for my writing', in the end, if for nothing else...

on the spinner: Kings of Convenience, Riot on an Empty Street; still alternating with the edgy electronic pummelings of Battles and the persistent cool of David Holmes, with an occasional dash of Shapes and Sizes' split lips winning hips a shiner.