Truth...?

So after spending yesterday reading Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, about whom and which--as is the perpetual case in TDAOCville--more anon, I've taken a slight detour into a mysterious genre of writing called "non-fiction." From what I gather, "non-fiction" is pretty much like fiction in every way, except that when you hand in your work, you have to provide the whole proof, not just your final theorem. Yeah, I know, I don't get it, either. Making stuff up is so much easier. Makes me nervous, anyway; non-fiction is the sort of thing smart people like John Ettore talk about. Dude might think I'm trying to start a Cleveland turf war. I'd so lose.

In any case, I'm an experimental sort of guy--why, just today, I tried going to work without stopping for coffee before getting on the highway, and hoo boy, let me tell you, experiment failed!--so (in time with the Mac's Backs Book club) I'm working through Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. It's not something I would have randomly picked up on my own--what with its terribly anti-Colbertian reliance on "facts" and "reality"--but in a freakish bout of good timing, it's working for me. I've recently stumbled (or re-stumbled) into a sort of (I guess you could say long-held, though perhaps personally under-recognized) loose interest of mine in the question of where people choose to live. Big empty concept in my head meets a book full of specific examples: somewhere right now, some business manager's synergy-leveraging sensor just went off and he or she has no idea why.

So that's fun. In May, the Mac's Backs Book Club returns to the faeries-laden lollipop-strewn here-there-be-dragons land of make-believe with The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar. I've been meaning to read her stuff for a while, so I plan on trying to make it for that. Umrigar will be joining the discussion, too, so if you come, you can ask her what it's like to lie for a living. For real!