"...women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.” - Gloria Steinem

I returned Anthony Bourdain’s Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones; it felt like a ragtag collection of essays that just wasn’t that compelling. The first couple essays I sampled didn’t make me want to read all of it, not in the least. I will keep an eye out for a used copy, but it wasn’t worth the full hardback price to me. And does anyone know if he and his wife Nancy got divorced? His other books are all dedicated to her, and he generally mentions her, but I am noticing that this book was NOT, and none of his current bios mention her anymore. Very sad.

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I finished Meg Wolitzer’s The Position last night. I was very sad to see it end, I haven’t enjoyed or been so thoroughly engrossed in a novel in a long time. Possibly since reading Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Wolitzer is a steady and solid yet nuanced writer who develops even her non-sympathetic characters beautifully. Reading this book and watching its plot, as it were, unfold, was a beautiful and peaceful experience; you were clearly in the hands of a master.
I borrowed Surrender Dorothy from the library, but, like Laurie King’s, Jane Austen’s, and Josephine Tey’s novels, I will ration Wolitzer’s novels, saving them for when I need them. And I MUST own this, anyway, along with all her other stuff.

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My boss lent me Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never let Me Go, which is good; I am enjoying reading it so much more than I thought I would. I didn’t want to come back from lunch, I could happily have stayed curled up in the armchair at Starbucks, latte in hand, reading, for the rest of the afternoon. It’s immensely more readable than his other stuff that I have read, Remains of the Day and parts of Unconsoled.
Knowing the plot twist renders the novel actually that much more disturbing, much like knowing the plot twist in “The Sixth Sense” left me scared, crying, and wracked with sorrow for Haley Joel Osment’s disturbed and haunted little boy. However, I can see how powerful the revelation of the secret could turn out to be as well.

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I got completely bogged down in HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness - much as I felt reading Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape, I just don’t find other, ruined civilizations all that terrifying, even if they are, as one review of Mountains suggested, indicative of “the fragility of human life.” Uh, ok. Reading the newspaper indicates daily the fragility of human life; squidlike, hex-pedal aliens do not. But that’s just me.

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I bought J. Maarten Troost’s Getting Stoned with Savages, his follow-up to Sex Lives of Cannibals. I am looking forward to reading it, maybe after the Ishiguro. I have a feeling I am going to need something sort of light after finishing that.

Or maybe I will tackle Ken Follett’s Whiteout. I haven’t read any Ken Follett since slogging through Pillars of the Earth on my mom’s recommendation, but Whiteout’s got killer viruses! And people bleeding out of their eyes! And sexy biohazard-suited scientists! In a race for their lives! Trying to save humankind! Because we’re fragile! See above!

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Is anyone else reading J. Robert Lennon’s story in July’s Harper’s, “Happyville”? I like Lennon; the first book of his I read was Light of Falling Stars; not as memorable an airplane-crash book as Rafael Yglesias’s Fearless, but good. Then I read his The Funnies, which was okay, but not great. And then I kinda forgot about him. But after reading this month’s installation of “Happyville,” I think I should go check out his other two novels, On the Night Plain, and Mailman (although the latter’s reviews make it sound like Confederacy of Dunces, which I found one of the most annoying books I have ever read).

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I leave you with this:
Primo on the porch, on a rainy day, with his new-from-the-library books.