Two Things

Ok, so, two things, for now: one, you guys should check out the essay in the Times Book Review. It is a short piece of humorous writing, of the type that usually shows up in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker, and it is about humorous writing (hooray, as saw in "The Avoidance of Love", for meetings of form and content). It is a funny look, I think, at the problem of humorous writing, and how serious to take it -- it is especially intriguing, I think, because of the depth of the authors he names at the end of the piece (Thurber, Woody Allen) compared to the more facile stuff that gets named generically (golf jokes, sex jokes).

Anyway, I need to cut out spending so much time reading essays because....I am packing my library. Now, before you get all excited, I am not quitting my almost imperceptible commitment to writing this blog. And, I am not physically putting my books in boxes. But! I am curtailing the number of books I buy. I am packing in the bounds of the ol' library, I guess. I am announcing here, before you and god, that I will not buy another book until I own no more than one hundred books that I have not read (current tally: 289).

That's a lot of books to read before I can get after my favorite pastime of buying books. But I think I can do it. I actually unofficially made this pledge about a month ago, and have been good since then, with one exception (I had lunch plans that fell through and felt so sorry for myself that I bought a book of short stories by Giovanni Verga). So wish me luck! I will keep you posted as we go along.