What the!

I was supposed to start a new story tonight. I've been meaning to start a new story the last few nights, but, uh. Er. Hey! What's that shiny thing over there that will distract you from my failure?! The upside of this, for you, dear reader, is I got those lists of links in the sidebar off the sidebar and on to their own dedicated page. Which means if you come back every four hours looking to see if I've added a new blog or article to my links, you can now go straight to that particular page without having to load up all this annoying blog crap. The rest of you beautiful people who come here for the wit, the conversation, the dazzling view, and oh let's not forget the hors d'oueuvueuvueres, the blog should take less time to load. Which means more time for fun, fun, fun.

Reading-wise, I read straight through Issue #1 of the Land-Grant College Review over the weekend. It was cool. If I'm doing the 50 books thing, I guess that counts as number seven, maybe; I'm counting it as a book because it felt like a book. But a very small, slender, easily held book, compared to Fuc--er, Frog. (1)

That's the thing--I've never been much of a short story reader, though I'm working on that now. (2) After reading Frog, the LGCR was a spot-hitter. Mostly. There were one or two stories near the end that I was kind of ehhh towards but for the most part it just felt so damned profound to be reading things that were complete within a couple thousand words. Plus as I was reading I was noticing things I'd like to do and things I don't do and things I won't do and so forth. (3)

Now I'm working on--or at least, over the weekend, I started--Rowing in Eden, by Elizabeth Evans. Which seems nice so far. I've read thirty pages. It's a novel. It's 340 pages. It uses paragraphs that are less than a page long.

I was planning on reading The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan next, but, I was in the kitchen instead of the living room when it came time to pick up the next book, and well that's my story. (4) I read Look at Me by Jennifer Egan sometime last year and loved it; if I had a shelf where I put the "special books" it would be up there with The Corrections and Infinite Jest and the rest of 'em. I of course don't have it in front of me right now and my memory sucks so I can't go into much detail but it was one of those books that the experience of reading it was the way you want every book-reading experience to be. So now I'm going to read her other book out of curiosity.

What made Look at Me all the more fun, I think, was that it was one of those random-buys: night out at the bookstore with the girlfriend, who was the one who found it; she decided she liked the cover, thought the story seemed interesting, but she didn't buy it. So I did. Because I am a nice guy. Then I read it. Now it's buried somewhere, waiting for the girlfriend to have the chance to read it. I just hope, when her time to read it comes, that she's as pleasantly surprised as I was. (5)