Rats

If Alberto Moravia's Conjugal Love were to be the last book I read this year, it would be the perfect bookend to Sam Savage's Firmin, the first book I read this year, in that where Firmin is a slender book about a man-like rat who successfully discovers himself through reading, Conjugal Love is a slim novel about a rat-like man who fails to fix his identity through writing.

There's also something in there about the successful or unsuccessful formation of emotional connections with others, but since Conjugal Love will not be the last book I read this year, the thesis stasis, from a temporal-aesthetic perspective, hardly seems worth following up on. Plus it seems kind of forced, anyway. Darn.

The last book of the year I'll read--or attempt to read, if I remain this fatigued for the remainder of '07--will be The Adolescent, but for real, this time. Or I could rally and cram Mason & Dixon in there, too. And The Recognitions. Also, that copy of the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War & Peace my girlfriend got me for our recent anniversary is looking pretty much totally sweet, too. (Litnerd love, yes.)

Or I could pick up this Dostoevsky and quickly fall asleep sitting up on my backless ottoman, which I've taken to sitting on at night on occasion in an attempt to keep myself from falling asleep at the lit-wheel. Lit hurts, baby. (But seriously, how do you people who are so much better than me at this do it? You're freaks, I tell you.)