Wednesday, July 29, 2015

The heart wants what it wants

People never say that about things that are, like, convenient. Oh, that's completely in line with my plans! The heart wants what it wants!

I have acquired a lot of books -- in my life, yes, but more specifically, in the last four months or so, and they have been arranged into a perfectly logical priority order. There are some awesome-looking books in that stack, and of course I have a staggering amount of professional reading I should be working through.

But man. I just have not wanted to read any of those things. Just about the only thing I have wanted to read is Aubrey/Maturin books.

The only illustration anyone needs for this topic
It's gone exactly according to script. Maybe two months of not reading anything at all, then finally, I give in and suddenly I'm reading all the time, in all those situations when I was so frustratingly stuck before: just not what I was so stubbornly focused on making myself read. So that's where I'm at: I have nothing to report except comfort reading: many books about ships.

It's so good, though. O'Brian has an almost Wodehousian ear for language, I think; both authors have those perfect turns of phrase that make me stop and laugh out loud in sheer appreciation. Much more importantly -- and I'm only just putting my finger on this -- O'Brian is like Jane Austen in that he generates humor as well as character by slyly slipping into a character's own perspective (if not his or her own voice) as part of the narration without giving any particular explicit indication that he's doing so. He also does the Austenian thing of reporting conversations telegraphically which just always tickles my funny bone. I probably mentioned these things the last time I wrote about these books? It's all still true.

So in short: I hope you are also reading things you enjoy this summer.


3 comments:

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    ReplyDelete
  2. HeeHee I regret absolutely nthn, too.

    High, girl!
    Whether you obtain morality4mortality to wiseabove
    and/or just glean tantalizing specimens for thy next best seller,
    I realize my penname is quite morbid, yet,
    you shall find in our blogs a lotta (subliminal) moxie
    which has taken this sinfull mortal yeeeeers to compile:
    I lay it ALL out for you, dear, with All-Star-Oxygems:

    Wouldn’t ya love an endless eternity
    of aplomBombs falling on thy indelible cranium?
    An XtraXcitinXpose with no
    zooillogical-expiration-date?
    An IQ much higher than K2?
    An extraordinarily, anti-establishment victory
    with a sardonic, satirical wit Who’s savvy??
    Here’s what the exquisite, prolific GODy sed
    (with a most excellent detector of bull§ht):

    “Faith, hope, and love,
    the greatest of these is love -
    jump into faith...
    and you'll see with love”
    Doesn’t matter if you don’t believe (what I write);
    God believes in you.

    Meet me Upstairs, girl, where the Son never goes down
    from a passionate, lucrative iconoclasm where you’ll find
    nonillionsXnonillionsXnonillionsXnonillionsXnonillionsX…
    of deluxe-HTTP [<- pi] opportunities for excitement BTW.

    Do it. Do the deed, dude. Sign into the Big House.

    ReplyDelete