- the food issue of the New Yorker
- a sad article about fetal alcohol syndrome in an old issue of the Walrus
- a secret quilt project
- the first year of my PhD
Tag Archive for 'reading'
So summer is near its end and I’m nowhere close to being finished IJ. I’m just not going to do it. I am more than halfway through, though, and I’m not giving up.
I am, however, taking a break to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, maybe partially because I listened to him tell a story on The Moth Podcast about being stranded in a train station at age 16. It’s going quickly; but then, it’s a manageable subway-reading size.
While reading it on the way to school the other day, a man wearing goggles asked me what I thought of it. He said he wasn’t going to tell me his opinion, because I was just at the start of the book. But then, when he got off the train, as the doors were closing, he turned around and looked at me and said “I didn’t love it.”
I think that Annie Dillard is the exact literary opposite of David Foster Wallace. Short deliberate sentences, short chapters. Lots of divisions, of ideas and thoughts. Reading Annie Dillard, I’m finding it hard to put the book down, desiring to read one more paragraph or section or oh look the next chapter is only 6 pages. I think that if The Writing Life was a thousand pages and Infinite Jest was merely 150, The Writing Life would still be shorter.
recent comments