Sunday, October 05, 2008

Hitting The Road

now reading: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

As promised, after my man-it's-been-too-long feelings on Thursday, I picked up a novel Friday and read thirty pages or so while subwaying to and from my internship.

God, I love reading novels.

Of course, this is my second year in a row to read one of his books in preparation for a late-in-the-year release of a film I expect to be quite good. Last time around, No Country for Old Men didn't really do it for me. But The Road won the Pulitzer; you know how I feel about that. ( = I love reading Pulitzer Prize-winning books, for the new folks)

Its paragraphs are even shorter than the paragraphs in NCfOM. But so far I can see where a person could get intrigued early on by the compelling premise of this man and boy -- who appear to be father and son, though it's not explicitly stated yet -- wandering through a wasteland, even if one had not read a lot about it and heard the buzz and watched it sell like mad after being distinguished by the Pulitzer committee AND Oprah. I even watched that Oprah interview with McCarthy last summer because a)I like authors b)I think it's awesome that Oprah gets someone who never does interviews to do an interview. Maybe she should be vice-president. Or maybe that says something about ol' Cormac appreciating what she does for reading -- or book sales.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Time to get back in the game

A month without a post? A month without picking up a novel? Can we say "Third Year of Law School" ... sigh!

I am reading, reading, reading, but none of it is fiction. Legal fictions, maybe, which are a whole other ball of wax. (Hmm, interesting, do lay people know what a "legal fiction" is? I can't say I ever gave it much thought before I came to law school.)

Two weeks ago, upon the sudden, unexpected (by me anyway) death of David Foster Wallace I started thinking a lot about when I will get to read another book of his, now that a few months have gone by since finishing Infinite Jest. I even touched The Broom of the System in the undergrad library and read a few pages before deciding not to check it out because it's 485 pages more than I can afford to deviate from my seven-class, 17-credit law regimen.

But 'Q' awaits -- Ishmael. Furthermore, I really want (need?) to read The Road before the movie. Time is running out, apocalyptically or no.