the plow that broke the plain (plane)

books in last four weeks:

1. the book thief by markus zusak
2. the worst hard time by tim egan
3. divisadero by michael ondaatje

1. incredible incredible incredible. actually left me sobbing for 2+ hours as i read the last chapters and in the time that immediately followed. i don't know what else to say about it. another wwII tale. about a young girl living through the third reich. this is nothing like anne frank.

2. nonfiction about the dust bowl. extremely well-composed. bigger man-made disaster than hurricane katrina or the san diego fires.

3. lovely literature by one of my favorite writers. finished it on the black ball ferry from victoria, bc to port angeles, wa.

no end of books in sight.

cyberpunk goes gardening

in my office, i wish that i could type ctrl+F and use the search function to find some missing papers.

on walks, i wish that i could point to plants and have a backlit text box hovering over with the common and scientific names of the plants. google earth-style.

its mousing through the world, always searching for the blinking cursor.

didnt molly in "neuromancer" have digitally-constructed roboeyes that gave time, temperature readings, etc. in the corner of her vision? i would like something like that, but with a built in encyclopedia.

glaciers moved over these rocks and smoothed them like this.

dolce

finished "suite francaise" last night after intermittent reading for two months. the stories were written in the early 1940s, in german-occupied france by irene nemirovsky. she was arrested by police in july 1942 because of her russian jewish background and disappeared. her husband was arrested in november 1942. they both died in auschwitz. their daughters survived along with her manuscripts. the stories are about the fate of the french during occupation. the first story is about parisians fleeing the city with the germans on their heels. the second is about the life of an occupied village. the stories do not flatter the french. one excerpt notes that the french do not want the germans or the english to win the war - they would prefer if both sides were defeated.

this continues my wwII-tinged reading:
the foreign correspondent by alan furst
the samurai's garden by gail tsukiyama
the history of love by nicole krauss
molokai by ??
the ministry of special cases by nathan englander
man walks into a room by nicole krauss

nonlinear organizing, high viscosity literatizing

http://www.literature-map.com/

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

two similar cluster-organizing websites. visual thesaurus is particularly fun to play with... click on a word and watch everything reconfigure. literature-map is interesting but i have not yet figured out who inputs the data linking authors. my tastes are seemingly predictable... i have not, however, seen edith wharton and tom robbins in the same cluster - but i could rationalize linking them through douglas coupland.

speaking of literary connections: please go read pulitzer winners "age of innocence" by edith and "angle of repose" by wallace stegner. then we should talk.

Don't drop your library book into the water. See empty reservoir below (in progress).

I stopped buying books about 14 months ago, and started keeping track of all of the books I read (and when I finish them) around the same time. I have read 46 books since June 2006. About 1 every two weeks. About 37 of those books have been from Multnomah County Library. I love the library - I go to the bookstore and write down everything I am interested in reading, then get online and put holds on everything and wait for the books to arrive at my local branch for pick-up. This is genius. The only downside is that I cannot directly lend people the books I am recommending.

Everything is enumerated.

Nicole Krauss' book "The History of Love" is just lovely. Continued my new-found theme of books with WWII connections, but mostly takes place around now in NYC. It is the story of Leo Gursky, a Polish Jew who survived the war and made his way to cracking locks and daydreaming in NYC, and the simultaneous coming-of-age story of Alma Singer. Alma's brother Bird is a genius in a 5 year olds body, not unlike another favorite literary child-philosopher, Bill Bob ("The River Why"). Recommended reading before or after: Jonathan Safran Foer's books "Everything is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". Jonathan is married to Nicole, and really, if you read "Illuminated", and then "History" and finally "Extremely", you would have a near perfect trio which elegantly and surreally builds on itself.

Other books read recently:

Samurai's Garden by Gale Tsukiyama

The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (This is like the last season of Sopranos. I am pretty certain that David Chase and J.K. Rowling are in cahoots.)