Elements of Style -- Illustrated!!!

I already own a copy of The Elements of Style by the immortal authors William Strunk and E.B. White. But I couldn't resist the new edition, The Elements of Style (illustrated). Artist Maira Kalman has added fabulous color drawings to the famous work on grammar, mechanics and style. "Somebody else's umbrella" illustrates how to properly form possessives. A red-haired boy in his PJs demonstrates dashes: "His first thought on getting out of bed -- if he had any thought at all -- was to get back in again." You can see some of the illustrations on Kalman's web site; check them out here.

Honorable Mentions of 2005

Here are three books I read this year that were really excellent, not quite Top Five, but definitely my honorable mentions for 2005

• Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel (2005). Calling this book a "coming of age" novel is literally accurate, but it doesn't quite convey the eccentric delights of narrator Dwight Wilmerding, slacker and searcher in contemporary Manhattan. Dwight is looking for meaning, but his funny voice and social conscience make stand out. I read another short story by Kunkel in the literary magazine n +1 (Issue 3, it does not appear to be online), and was very impressed with that too.
• Too Late to Die Young by Harriet McBryde Johnson (2005). I can identify with Ms. Johnson as a smart woman and a Southerner, and then she takes me a little farther down the narrative road with her, and I can imagine what life is like as a disability rights activist who uses a wheelchair. Her memoir is funny and sharp, and it takes apart of lot stereotypes and preconceptions about ability and disability.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936). I read this for a library science class this year and immediately put it to work on my friends and family. It promotes the fiendish idea of getting people to do what you want by being really polite and nice to them, and by making them feel good about themselves (insert evil cackling laughter here).

Spoonreader's Top 5 Books of 2005

In the wonderful novel High Fidelity, the narrator Rob Fleming compulsively compiles Top 5 lists of everything from his favorite pop songs to his worst break-ups. In tribute to that book, I will be unveiling several Top 5 lists between now and the end of the year. My Top 5 lists, of course, will deal with books, read and unread.

Here are the Top 5 books I read this year. Not all of them were published in 2005, but I read 'em all this year, so here we go. They are in ranked in order.

• No. 5: Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon (2005). Irena and her family live in cosmopolitan, multicultural Sarajevo when it comes under siege during the Yugoslav war of the 1990s. The family, along with their talking African Grey parrot Pretty Bird, survive without electricity or water in a city transformed by sniper fire and violence. By turns tragic, funny and realistic, this important novel captures the atrocity of warfare unleashed on the modern city. Its author is National Public Radio host Scott Simon, who based the novel on his reporting and direct observations from war-torn Sarajevo.
• No. 4: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor (1955). Through her biting, incisive portraits of Southern mores and manners, O'Connor gets at the very essence of life: the loneliness of physical existence, the fragility of genuine emotional connection and the transcendent hope that there is a world beyond the mere physical senses. My favorite story was "Good Country People," in which an angry, educated spinster unexpectedly meets her match in a traveling Bible salesman. O'Connor truly deserves the title "master of the short story."
• No. 3: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (2003). This book is about the art of literature and life. It's also about poverty, about peace activism, about the 1960s, about the Catholic church in the 20th century, and about the elusive nature of moral authority. It's also a beautifully written biography of four Catholic writers who were contemporaries: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor (see above) and Walker Percy.
• No. 2: Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005). Feminist outlier Camille Paglia takes a break from the culture wars to make an analytical, insightful tour of the world's best poetry. She tackles the likes of Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats as well as a few newbies like comedian Wanda Coleman and folk singer Joni Mitchell. It's a fun English lit class with its feet on the ground and its mind on the sublime.
  
• No. 1: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (2004). I wrote about this book -- a novel in the form of a letter written by a country pastor to his young son -- just recently, so I won't add much now. (You can read my previous post here.) Aside from being beautifully written, it also includes an important story of spiritual and social justice.
  

On the ephemerality of rankings

I picked up a copy of Kazuo Ichiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go at a charity book sale this week. You'll remember (from my previous posting) that Time magazine put this book on its best 100 novels since 1923 list, even though the book came out just this year. Personally, I think it takes awhile to draw a true conclusion on the merits of any particular novel, and a book should be out for at least a year before I would include it on my top 100 novels list.
Meanwhile, The New York Times doesn't think "Never Let Me Go" is good enough to make its 10 best books of 2005 list (though they did grant the novel a place on their list of 100 notable books of this year).
I bring this up just to emphasize the point that I think "best of" lists are really interesting conversation starters, but not the end-all and be-all of good taste.
I will let you know what I think of "Never Let Me Go," probably sometime in '06.
Finally, I'm contemplating my own best of list for 2005, but it will be best books I personally read in 2005. I'm not fast enough to keep up with all the interesting books published in a given year! More on this topic later.

2005 Best Books list, part I

It's that wonderful time of year again, when magazines and newspapers start publishing their best of the year lists.
The New York Times published their Top 10 list today, with five places for fiction and five places for non-fiction. The list includes links to the reviews and, in some cases, the first chapter. Yeah!
The whole list is here.
You'll also find links on this page to the NYT's 100 notable books of the year and links to previous years' lists.

There is a Balm in Gilead

When I read the reviews of Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, I remember thinking to myself, That sounds boring. The books is a letter written by a preacher anticipating his own death. He's writing about his life to his young son. I just thought that sounded sentimental and hokey. Fortunately for me, a friend recommended Gilead as something she thought I personally would really like. Oh, the power of the personal recommendation! I'm so glad she did, because this book is marvelous. Its writing style is plain and clean and beautiful, like an Iowa sunset. (The book is set in Gilead, Iowa.) And there's a lot of gentle humor and some interesting Civil War history. Robinson also wrote Housekeeping, a completely different novel that is also well-loved by many people. I read that book in college (the class was a literature class called "Work and Gender") but I barely remember it. I will have to go back and read it again.

The Spirituality of Writing

It took me a year to read The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. It is a sizable biography of four writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. They were Catholic and writing at the same time (primarily the 1950s and '60s) and aware of each other's work.
This book is beautifully written, but it's also dense. I would pick it up, read a little, put it down and then pick it back up again. I really got going after I started reading Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. (Read the excellent short story the books is named after here.)
Elie's compelling theme is that these writers were all on spiritual pilgrimage via their writing. The writers themselves are fascinating:

• Dorothy Day: pacifist, journalist, war protester, founder of The Catholic Worker movement.
• Thomas Merton: A Trappist monk and writer who explored Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality.
• Flannery O'Connor: the master of the short story, a wary member of New York literary society who was exiled by debilitating illness to her Georgia farm.
• Walker Percy: a Louisiana gentleman with a strong interest in medicine and science.

Most of the reviews of this book say it is hard to categorize because it is rich and complicated, and I completely agree. All these writers were vibrant contrarians, and Elie admires and accentuates their differences. At the same time, he sees them all as master communicators and even concilitators. In an interesting interview, Elie says he respects them because they had vibrant, complex messages to convey through their writing.

One of the main traits I champion in the people in my book is their ability to write about matters of faith in terms the nonbeliever can appreciate. The ability of Merton or Dorothy Day to maintain a dialogue with the modern world--as Vatican II urged Catholics to do--is just profound. They stayed in touch with the average middle-class person who thinks religion is bosh.
Those who undertook the later protests against the Vietnam War don't seem interested in dialogue. They don't seem to have met those who supported the war with mutual respect. Dialogue wasn't really attempted. That was Merton's objection to them. He said nobody's mind was changed through those symbolic actions.

Read the whole interview here.

Anne Rice & Jesus Christ

I love Anne Rice's vampire and witch novels, and I love her newest novel about Jesus Christ.
Isn't that a funny sentence?

On Reading: Good news/bad news

I read two articles this week that really resonated with me about reading.

First the bad news. Why does the concept of the general reader seem to be in decline? This article hypothesizes that students are forced to specialize their education for a job, so much so that reading for general knowledge has disappeared. Check out the opening anecdote:

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.
Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"
After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."
"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."

Read the whole article here.

Now for the good news. A woman in New Mexico who loves to read has purchased the entire Penguin Classic collection. That's 1,082 books for roughly 8000 bucks.

Ms. Gursky's collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection.

Read all about it here.

Yann Martel's next novel

Canada's Globe and Mail reports that "Life of Pi" author Yann Martel is working on a new novel about the Holocaust. He recently read excerpts from the unfinished novel in a cafe in Jerusalem.
Their story says Martel knows he it is a difficult subject:

"I'm sure people will say that it trivializes the Holocaust," he said, adding that the other danger in discussing the Holocaust "is universalizing it in way that removes its Jewishness."
But he believes the end is worth the risk.
"The Holocaust has to become part of the rough and tumble of everyday discourse -- as much as that might hurt the survivors," he said, adding quickly,"And I don't mean that as disrespect to them. But you have to realize that those discussing it are trying to find a way to understand it better so that it won't happen again."

Read the whole story here while it's still available on the open Web.

Meanwhile, I recently picked up a copy of "The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios," Martel's short story collection. I've read the first story of the collection. It was very different from "Life of Pi," but has the same compassionate voice.
There's a beautiful passage where he talks about discovering his desire to write and what motivated his storytelling:

My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question is not the point; be it love, envy or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But the story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect -- in other words a good idea that moves -- that was my lofty aim. When such an emotive idea came to me, when the spark of inspiration lit up my mind like a bonfire, the charge was like nothing I'd ever felt.

Read an excerpt here.

Scott Turow's new novel

Scott Turow has a new novel out, it's called "Ordinary Heroes." The Los Angeles Times had a positive review of it. It's about a reporter who uncovers a mystery about his late father's actions during World War II.
Here's an excerpt from the review talking about Turow's novels:

It's been easy to classify — as we have a great tendency to do —these novels as legal thrillers, part of the avalanche that arrived in the time of John Grisham because the tales were spun in and around the law.

It is clear now that's a mistake and always has been. What Turow wrestles with is of a deeper and more complex nature. The correct category for Turow is rather that of a major American novelist rising from the tradition of the Midwest,such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and James T. Farrell.

Read the whole review here while it's still available on the open Web.

Reading Ulysses blog

My friend Jill took me up on my carping about never having read Ulysses, by James Joyce. The first meeting of our Ulysses book group is set for Saturday. I've started a new blog for the effort, here's the link.

A Short Story for Halloween

I like to find cool, spooky things to read at Halloween -- stories more in the vein of folklore than horror. Last year, I checked out Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I had mixed opinions on. (Read that post here.) This year, I think I've found something much better.
I got to thinking about the role of the Devil in literature: Old Scratch, Beelzebub, the Dark Man, the Stranger. Probably the Devil's first appearance in literature is Biblical: The temptation in the garden in the book of Genesis, but even more prominently in the Book of Job -- the devil is the instigator for the troubles that beset kindly Job. Then there's the devil as anti-hero in John Milton's Paradise Lost. More recently, there Stephen King's The Stand -- the devil comes to earth after a killer flu wipes out most of the world's population. Even the country music song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" has its lyrical moments:

The devil went down to Georgia
He was looking for a soul to steal
He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind
And he was willing to make a deal

But I digress! (Read all the lyrics here.)
This year, spoonreader presents, for your Halloween reading pleasure, the short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," by Stephen Vincent Benet. Webster was an actual historical figure, a noted lawyer and orator, and a proud unionist (though he died before the Civil War started). In this story, the farmer Jabez Stone makes a deal with the devil in exchange for bountiful crops and worldly gain. When it's time to pay up, Stone loses his nerve, and turns to his friend Webster to save him from the bad deal he's made. In this scene, the Devil has returned and informed Webster that he intends to collect on the soul of Mr. Stone. Webster responds to the contrary:

Dan'l Webster's brow looked dark as a thundercloud. "Pressed or not, you shall not have this man!" he thundered. "Mr. Stone is an American citizen, and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince. We fought England for that in '12 and we'll fight all hell for it again!"
"Foreign?" said the stranger. "And who calls me a foreigner?"
"Well, I never yet heard of the dev -- of your claiming American citizenship," said Dan'l Webster with surprise.
"And who with better right?" said the stranger, with one of his terrible smiles. "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself - and of the best descent - for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster,though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."
"Aha!" said Dan'l Webster, with the veins standing out in his forehead. "Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!"

And thus Daniel Webster goes to court against the Devil. Read the whole of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" here -- The University of Texas Tarlton Law Library has posted a fine copy with illustrations at their web site.

Zadie Smith on David Foster Wallace

British author Zadie Smith is very high on my must-read list. She's been in the media quite a bit lately with the release of her new book, "On Beauty." (Listen to radio interviews with her here and here.) I love what she has to say about literature and writing. Last month, she was in O, the Oprah magazine, where she wrote about what literature means to her and picked out her favorite books. (This is a regular feature in O -- just about every month a celebrity picks out their favorite books and why. It's usually fascinating.)
So one of Smith's favorite books was David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." Smith writes:

Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is "the evil that men do." I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them.

Read the rest of her take on Wallace here and read about her philosophy of literature here.
Her take on that book is interesting because I've been feeling a bit guilty about my recent post on "Brief Interviews" where I wrote "the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them." (Read the full post here. ) I'll be the first to admit that might be a misreading the stories. Not all writing should be about love, happiness, etc. As readers, we have to grapple with the ugly, the cruel and the unjust without insisting on black-and-white moral certitude or sentimental mawkishness. Maybe I should go back and re-read "Brief Interviews." It's certainly rich enough to merit a second read and a re-thinking.
On the other hand, if I do that, when will I ever get to Wallace's "Oblivion"? I need more time to read!

Time's Top 100 Novels

Time magazine has published a list of the best English-language novels since 1923, the year Time published its first issue. I love lists, they're fun conversation-starters -- the nay-sayers who claim lists are too reductive need to lighten up.
Time's list has interesting caveats. Because it starts in 1923, that disqualifies perennial favorite Ulysses, written by James Joyce in 1922. It only includes novels (knocking out of contention my beloved Spoon River Anthology, a volume of poetry). And it includes works written in English from all over the world, not just American novels.
Here's my quick riff on the list:

• Books I absolutely agree with: The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Infinite Jest, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sun Also Rises, To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchmen.
• Books I haven't read but really want to: All the King's Men, Death Comes for the Archbishop, At Swim-Two-Birds, Lolita, The Moviegoer, The Sound and the Fury, White Teeth
• A book that shouldn't be on the list: Possession by A.S. Byatt -- I just don't think it's that good.
• A book that seems too recently published to have made the list: Never Let Me Down by Kazuo Ishiguro -- Didn't that just come out in 2005???
• Books on the list that I have never heard of, not even in passing, not even heard of their authors: Appointment in Samarra, The Assistant, Call It Sleep, A Dance to the Music of Time, Loving, The Man who Loved Children, The Recognitions, Red Harvest, Revolutionary Road, Snow Crash, The Sportswriter. Boy do I feel ignorant now.

Lest you think the list was created after exhaustive study and massive polling, you should know that apparently Time's two book critics merely put together their lists of favorite books and then hashed out small areas of disagreement. Not that I'm criticizing that -- the great novels are art, and there are limitations to how objectively you can quantify them.
Read the whole list here. (And thanks to my friend Ryan F. for telling me about it!)

Baseball fever

I don't get much reading done in October because I'm busy watching post-season baseball. It means late night games and mornings spent devouring the sports section. To add to the excitement, our local team the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have new owners and hopes are hesitantly but joyfully higher for the 2006 season. (Read all about it here.)
Meanwhile, my spouse and I are deciding on a baseball book to read together when Spring Training starts.
Here are some of the books in contention:

• Three Nights in August, by Buzz Bissinger. A relatively new book. Bissinger had total access to St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa (a Tampa native, by the way). Read an excerpt herehere.
• Ball 4, by Jim Bouton. A library colleague heartily recommends this one; it's one of baseball's first real insider's accounts. Bouton wrote a memoir about trying to resecitate his career with the elusive knuckleball pitch during the '69 season.
• The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, by George Plimpton. It started as an April Fool's joke: Sports Illustrated "reports" on a Zen mystic with 100 mph+ pitch hiding out in the Mets' Spring Training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla. (right across the bay from Tampa). The story was a prank, but it got so much attention it was later expanded into a book. I love the original article's lead (how a newspaper story starts). Here it is:

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement.

Read the original magazine story here.

A note on copyright and spoonreader

Unlike most people, I find copyright fascinating. It's as old as our country and mentioned in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) as one of the rights of Congress: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
For a library science class, I wrote a paper on the problem of orphan works -- what do you do when you want to preserve or copy something, but cannot locate the copyright holder to seek permission or compensate them? It's a knotty problem, hardly promoting progress. Read more about the orphan works problem here and here.
I quote from a lot of books on this blog. I believe the quotations I use are permissible as a fair use under copyright law -- I'm commenting on the work, and I don't believe my quoting of the works undermines the commercial prospects of the books about which I write. In fact, just the opposite; I hope people will be inspired by my blog to purchase them or borrow them from a library. (Read more about copyright and fair use here.)
I also make a good faith effort not to link to works that I suspect have been posted to the Internet without permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright is a funny thing: If there's not enough, people don't have much incentive to create. Too much, though, and it stifles creativity by preventing people from building on the works of others. (This is a particular problem for popular music like hip-hop and techno.) My favorite book on this topic is Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Nancy Kranich, former president of the American Library Association, says of his book (and I agree):

Siva Vaidhyanathan has done a big favor for the academic and library communities. In this book, he has spelled out in clear, understandable language what's at stake in the battles over the nation's intellectual property. The issues brought forward are critical to the future of scholarship and creativity. Librarians and academics are wise to purchase this book and add it to their 'must read' lists.

If you have any questions or concerns about copyright and this blog, feel free to contact me: spoonreader [at] gmail [dot] com.

What I'm Reading Now,

I prefer to read one book at a time. But that's the ideal -- the reality is that often I am reading several books at once. Usually this is because I have to read a certain book for book group or some other obligation, or because a book is boring me at that moment but I may be willing to come back to it later. So I'm going to start posting from time to time a list of the books I'm reading and the books I want to read next.
What I'm reading now:

• Shock Wave by James O. Born. A fast-paced Florida crime novel. Born will appear at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29.
• Couples by John Updike. This books reeks of 1960s overpriviledged suburban malaise -- a major theme is adultery as self-actualizing quest. The Amazon reviews are diverse and fascinating -- read 'em here. I don't like the characters, but it's hard not to wonder what these awful people will do next. A few friends who are older than I am say that was just the nature of the era. The philandering couples in this book would be about 75 today.
  
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie. This is a fairly dense biography of four American Catholic authors writing at about the same time: Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy. Elie's style is languid and thematic, well-suited for his exploration of the writers' ideas and intellectual milieu.

What I want to read next:

• "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor. I picked this short story collection for my book group because I knew I might not read it otherwise, and it would probably be really good.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. This novel won the Pulitzer a few years back. Subject matter includes the Holocaust, comic books and Harry Houdini. I have high hopes for this one.
• "Oblivion" by David Foster Wallace. I love David Foster Wallace on a very visceral, non-logical level. Having said that, I found his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" to be very sad -- the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them. I don't think is really typical of him -- his book Infinite Jest is one of the kindest novels I can this of. So I have some trepidation about reading his most recent work, Oblivion. You can find a couple of (mixed) reviews of Oblivion here, here, and here.

Kunkel's Indecision

I finished an endearing first novel today, Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel. I liked it very much. His hero, Dwight Wilmerding, is an overeducated, underemployed twenty-ish Manhattanite trying to figure out what to do with his life. The answer involves psychoanalysis from his sister, a trip to Ecuador and democratic socialism.
I love Dwight's voice -- it's complicated, ironic, sincere and funny. Sample passage:

The train pulled out of another quiet white-painted town and recovered that slack regular ratcheting sound of all trains. I was on my way to see dad, to play some golf, to sip some scotch, and then in the end, or somewhere in the middle, at an opportune moment, before it slipped past, or maybe, on the other hand, right away, the minute I saw him, first things being first, and just in order to get it over with -- anyway I was on my way to ask dad for some money. I had every intention of telling him I had lost my job, and in the context of my resulting penuriousness I would request a loan. Or ask him to take me in for a while once I got back from Ecuador. Or both things, actually. That would make the most sense from an economic point of view, at least if I could deal with the psychic cost of living with him for the first time in fourteen years, and without mom and Alice around to parry him and distribute throughout the household their various counterpointing moods. It would be interesting to see what I decided to do, always assuming I did decide, which I shouldn't necessarily do.

Kunkel reminds me somewhat of David Foster Wallace, or at least informed by some of the themes that Wallace tries to deal with in his writing -- the self-consciousness of art, the problem of nihilistic irony, and the possibility of sincere emotional connection between author and reader. For more on this topic, or if you have a passion for contemporary fiction, I strongly recommend Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," from his collection of essays and journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
But more than these emotive/aesthetic types of questions, "Indecision" is very much concerned with the inequalities of global capitalism and the appropriate response to the relative abundance of upper-class America. I'm very much looking forward to more books by Benjamin Kunkel.

The End

A rainy Sunday afternoon makes me think of the inevitable: death. Here's Shakespeare's Hamlet on the topic. (The lyricism of the passage is quite comforting.)

If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

The full text of Hamlet is online; read it here. Shakespeare's complete works are here.