This, that, and the other

• This:
  
  I'm still reading Wizard of the Crow. It's taking me longer to read than I'd planned on, based on the "can't put it down" reports I've seen elsewhere. I've been pulled away from my reading chair the last few days by other activities. It does not help that I find it hard to work up the energy and desire to pick the book back up after each time I put it down. It's become one of those "I read and I read and I read for hours" books and then I check the page count and I've only read 20 pages. I feel nervous voicing this fact, knowing the book has many champions, and I don't feel qualified right now to explain why the book isn't sucking me in. Tough to prove a lack. I'm going to stick with it--I've already dropped one book mid-stride this year, and for far better reasons than I could give were I to drop this one. But right now I'm mostly looking forward to getting into a rock block of recent litblogger favorites that I've started lining up on my TBR pile and on my library card. And, well, I'd like to finish Wizard and then go back and read the reviews and the comments, to see if I can give a little more flesh to my currently seemingly contrarian opinion. I know there's a certain line of thought that suggests that litbloggers have a responsibility not just to praise books but to question them and criticize them as well, which, though I tend to be a nice guy, and I tend to say nice things about books, and though I tend to be rather forgiving as a reader, I am actually cool with. But, fuck, this is a book I don't really want to be the lone odd voice out on. I don't really want to be that guy. But, well, we'll see what happens.



• That:
  
  I'm still processing Gravity's Rainbow. Yeah, I know, I read it like three months ago, get over it, already, right? It ended, and it's not restarting. It's dead, man. Dead. To which I say: I've started picking through a 1986 volume of criticism edited by Harold Bloom which I'd grabbed from the library so I could read the Rocket Power essay by Richard Poirier, the essay that pretty much every other essay about Pynchon has to tip its hat to. I'm not committing myself to reading all these essays, but what I have read has been entertaining and enlightening, at least in a geeky academic way. (I make no apologies for my nerdish behavior. In some cultures, it's considered attractive.) This has got my mind re-thinking some things, and I've started to get into this line of thought about, something to do with Gravity's Rainbow being, not just surprisingly not as hard to read as I'd expected going into it, and also far funnier than I'd expected, but also being a far angrier book than I realized, even when I was reading it. Which is really another piece of evidence that goes onto the "Yes he does" pile in the "Does Pynchon give a shit what you think?" debate that's been raging in my head since long before I read any of his work. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much concern there is throughout the novel. Which, well, OMG, intentional fallacy alert, right? Whatevs--wouldn't be the first fallacy I've committed on this blog.



• The other:
  
  Back in my drug-addled and fancy-free youth of November 2006, I blatantly made fun of an issue regarding whether litbloggers had a responsibility to their readers to inform them when they had received free reviews copy of books. I made fun of it because I thought it was a stupid issue. Of course, back then, I had not yet become the sort of person who accepted free review copies of books from publishers, mostly because the only books I'd ever been offered were things like My Book of Pictures Without Any Words in Them and How to Write a Book that Darby Won't Give Two Shits About, the books I suspect that everybody with a blog that ever uses the word "book" in any post gets offered. But now I'm going to mention that I do have a couple review copies on my end table right now, not so much because I feel I have a duty to you the reader of this blog, but more because I had that joke about those fake book titles in my mind, and I really needed to use it. Both books are short story collections, so I've been reading them a bit here, a bit there, and I'm going to finish them both most likely, and I'm going to say stuff about them the way I say stuff about most everything I read, and you're going to be free to decide whether or not I'm being a greedy free-book-grubbing whore. Maybe at some point I'll write up a review copy policy or something, though I'm not sure how much more I can say other than "While intriguing, review copies are hardly what I had in mind when I started this blog, though, and let's be frank, actually getting a book into my apartment is a major step toward getting me to actually read a book." I'll dig up the old Businessese thesaurus and dress it up nice and fancy, maybe.