Judgment of Paris

You've had a big responsibility suck lately, because you went from having your school books that other people need to read to read, and now you just have the books you've endorsed (by buying) to read, for yourself, to justify to you that you bought them for a reason. Soon you will have to get a job, which is a whole terrifying glob of responsibility that is about to rain down on you, but you are deciding that for like what, a week, a few days, you will put that off, because you pulled two all-nighters and one all-dayer to write your final papers and they are not bad. So you schedule your days to have certain far away things to do this week, and you always take the local to these things, because it has been too rainy for the park and you think that the next best place to the park, reading-wise, is the subway. For a while, you read the school books you skimped on, and get a lot of tail ends of arguments from post-structuralists. You get bored with that and feel the feeling you've had for a long time that you need more fiction in your life, like that if you get back into those cavalcades of sentences you think you've always been in love with, so you look at your shelves of books and you feel like you should start reading all of them at once, which is not totally feasible.

You think about reading and writing about the book club book, which you have doubts that anyone else you know is reading but your poor mother, who is probably weirded out by it, and you read some more of it on a bus and get the nagging feeling that for Flannery O'Connor, there is little to do but just quote her so that everyone can see her for themselves. You buy a PG Wodehouse novel, but that lasts about three Brooklyn-to-Harlem local subway rides. So you yank like ten books off of your shelve and do that dopey thing you do where you make a list of books to finish in May and then in June and then in July and you know that maybe like ten per cent of them, you'll have finished by August. But there is a more pressing issue at hand, at that is that you want to have a good thing, probably preferably fiction, to have your hooks into on all of those subway rides. So you look at the stack next to your bed, and you think about it.

You have yourself narrowed down to Johnson's selected essays, a book of short stories by Cortazar, the Spoils of Poynton, the Good Soldier, the Animal that Therefore I Am, and Paradise Lost, which is, looking at it, a lot less fiction and way fewer novels than you would've thought. Hm. A thing these have in common is that you bought them all for no reason. You keep thinking about the seas of sentences you thought you would be looking forward to so much, which you guess makes either James or Ford the frontrunner. And you read them for a while and you have this terrible feeling that the sentences are, what, not doing it for you? That you can't delight in sentences with the ease with which you once did? And you think that maybe this is like the whole reading-books-as-if-they-were-subway-maps ordeal that you had months ago, but it's different from that. Instead you get this sort of mortifying gut thing that you've fucked up, that like no way will you ever read again the right way, that you've failed to ask the Fisher King how he was wounded and now you need some book to be, what, an Awakening. You wonder whether there is any one book that does this.

A thing you think about just now is your Failsafe Song, which is Everyone by Van Morrison, and which is the only song that you will not listen to when you are miserable and need pop music to cheer you up. The reason you won't do that is that you are afraid that one day you will listen to the song and it will fail to cheer you up and then where will you be? And now you sit in front of your bookshelf and wonder whether or not whatever you pick up next will be the sort of failsafe book, the book you will need to restore the Fisher King, and your two shelves of book look bigger than other and you're just even confused about whether you've got to the Failsafe Book, and yet you've got to read something and there they are. So, decide.