It appears that Maybury has tagged me with some class of book meme, which explains why I was feeling under the weather yesterday. The common wisdom is that you have to starve these things if you want to get better, but I’m going to indulge it this time because the results make me look sinister and dangerous.
The challenge: pick up nearest book, open to page 123, write down sixth, seventh and eighth sentences.
It is war. It is “our nation” against the US Government… If 10 teenage Jews and liberals had blown up a Nuremberg beer hall with Hitler and a thousand storm troopers inside, they would have been applauded.
From I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary by John Higgs. (I should point out that the ellipsis is in the original text. Well, not the original text. But it’s in the book.) I’m mildly disappointed that I have this in my pocket, because the next closest book is a thousand-page guide to current VAT legislation, and that would have garnered me mad economic cred.
I’m supposed to pass this on to five people. Nads to that. In fact, I am anti-tagging you: if anyone reading this post gets tagged by someone else, you don’t have to do it. You may thank me in the comments.
Over the past while I’ve soldiered through the majority of Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, a book I bought on a whim while wandering through the History section of Hughes & Hughes. It’s interesting and all, but relentlessly bleak is only entertaining for so long. I rather stupidly decided to take a break from it to read At Swim-Two-Birds and naturally I haven’t yet managed to get back to it, despite being less than a hundred pages from the end. In my defence the writing is pretty small and he does that thing where a new chapter starts right after the old one ends. (Authors: we need that bit of white space at the end of a chapter. It gives us a sense of accomplishment.)
Speaking of Flann O’Brien: as soon as I finished At Swim I went straight out and bought The Third Policeman, and it was a struggle not to just swipe an armful of him off the shelf. He is magnificent. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Irish writing, but this I can get behind.
Most recently I’ve finished The Dice Man. It’s a very good read with some nice stylistic choices and inventive use of language. It also has that snazzy something I love in countercultural lit from the 70s – after the idealism burned off, but before it started blowing itself.
Finally, on similar lines, a biography of Tim Leary is currently residing in my coat pocket. Unfortunately the writing is determinedly uninteresting, which is practically heretical given the subject matter. Take Hunter S. Thompson’s quote on the jacket: “Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives.” That’s more like it. Why couldn’t someone like him have written it?
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