Mennonite In A Little Black Dress, Rhoda Janzen (365 Books, Day 24)

Sometimes I am overcome by the desire to read a bestseller.

It's a zeitgeist thing. I vividly remember that one day on the T between Kendall/MIT and Central, every single other person in the entire subway car was reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It felt like being in a bad horror movie and I rather expected them to mob me, or issue me the required copy. I got so I could recognize that cover a hundred feet away from a tiny sliver of it; that is how it goes with bestsellers. And then people start referring to them, and there start being parodies, and chunks of my acquaintance start assuming I've read whatever the thing is, because I read, don't I? And the critical reviews of this one or that one aren't that terrible, and the movie has actors I like, and I find myself at a bookstore or in a library eying the thing dubiously and then picking it up and sitting down with it and starting to turn pages.

Once (one time) when I was eleven years old I picked up a book simply and solely because it was a bestseller and it was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The rest of the time, it hasn't worked so well. I did read a book and a half of Stieg Larsson, in rapidly increasing incredulity. But generally I might as well stab myself with a fork (an experience remarkably like that of reading John Grisham).

( I read this book because I was starting to want to read Eat, Pray, Love. )

Mennonite In A Little Black Dress, Rhoda Janzen (365 Books, Day 24)

Sometimes I am overcome by the desire to read a bestseller.

It's a zeitgeist thing. I vividly remember that one day on the T between Kendall/MIT and Central, every single other person in the entire subway car was reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It felt like being in a bad horror movie and I rather expected them to mob me, or issue me the required copy. I got so I could recognize that cover a hundred feet away from a tiny sliver of it; that is how it goes with bestsellers. And then people start referring to them, and there start being parodies, and chunks of my acquaintance start assuming I've read whatever the thing is, because I read, don't I? And the critical reviews of this one or that one aren't that terrible, and the movie has actors I like, and I find myself at a bookstore or in a library eying the thing dubiously and then picking it up and sitting down with it and starting to turn pages.

Once (one time) when I was eleven years old I picked up a book simply and solely because it was a bestseller and it was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The rest of the time, it hasn't worked so well. I did read a book and a half of Stieg Larsson, in rapidly increasing incredulity. But generally I might as well stab myself with a fork (an experience remarkably like that of reading John Grisham).

( I read this book because I was starting to want to read Eat, Pray, Love. )

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

the good thing about being ill is the dreams

I dreamed that several people I know were wandering through something similar to a holodeck, which we used to play role-playing games. It was set up as a shopping mall, and a shopping mall at Christmas, with all the lights and tinsel and fake snow and giant animatronic animals and what-have-you. tiamat360 and I were walking together. She hadn't been in the environment before.

Suddenly, I saw someone in the distance, a stooped man in medieval academic robes, surrounded by some Things that weren't very human. "Run," I said. "That's Thomas Hobbes. We've had him in these games before. Anything you say to him, he'll explain to you according to his own worldview, and then it will be like that for you for the rest of the game, unless you can find something to counteract it. The annoying thing is that it seems to stick outside the game a bit, and we have all had to spend too much time reading John Locke. You see how he's surrounded by his friends?"

"But what's he doing in a shopping mall?" Tiamat asked.

Then we saw the posters.

Then we started running like hell, because even Locke could not have saved us.

He was there to give a reading of his translation of the Iliad.

( I realize that some of you may not understand what a thing of terror, horror, and unmitigated misery this really is. Have an excerpt. )

the good thing about being ill is the dreams

I dreamed that several people I know were wandering through something similar to a holodeck, which we used to play role-playing games. It was set up as a shopping mall, and a shopping mall at Christmas, with all the lights and tinsel and fake snow and giant animatronic animals and what-have-you. tiamat360 and I were walking together. She hadn't been in the environment before.

Suddenly, I saw someone in the distance, a stooped man in medieval academic robes, surrounded by some Things that weren't very human. "Run," I said. "That's Thomas Hobbes. We've had him in these games before. Anything you say to him, he'll explain to you according to his own worldview, and then it will be like that for you for the rest of the game, unless you can find something to counteract it. The annoying thing is that it seems to stick outside the game a bit, and we have all had to spend too much time reading John Locke. You see how he's surrounded by his friends?"

"But what's he doing in a shopping mall?" Tiamat asked.

Then we saw the posters.

Then we started running like hell, because even Locke could not have saved us.

He was there to give a reading of his translation of the Iliad.

( I realize that some of you may not understand what a thing of terror, horror, and unmitigated misery this really is. Have an excerpt. )

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.