Are there any of you out there? Folks who crave a challenging, somewhat traumatic, and ultimately immeasurably-rewarding reading experience? Let me recommend something on the highest possible terms: Infinite Summer is your chance to spend the summer reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with online guidance and support sponsored by The Morning News and An Event Apart.

After Wallace’s death last fall, I pulled my copy of the Jest off the shelf. more...

A coupla weeks back, the new SFGate CultureBlog had a little writeup on a book called PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. They offered a snippet that got me intrigued. A sample:

Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don’t fully understand, you’re still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you’ve been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that’s just right for your body’s needs, as it was before you fell asleep. more...

Earlier today, the_lucky_duck asked me a hypothetical question which I shall rephrase thusly:

The Gestapo is enforcing a new rule: Everyone gets to own five (and only five) books, and those five are the only books you ever get to crack open again. (Book sharing will be punishable by death or something. I dunno. Just play along, okay?) So, which five books do you want to have with you for the rest of your days?

A ridiculous question, and one that’s perfect to answer on a blog and solicit additional answers to in the comments. My five (at this point in time, anyway):

Finnegans Wake
The Sound and the Fury
The Mezzanine
Stranger In a Strange Land
The Power of Now

Your turn!

Tonight, the Berkeley Finnegans Wake Group hit this:

Poor Isa sits a glooming so gleaming in the gloaming; the tincelles a touch tarnished wind no lovelinoise awound her swan’s. Hey, lass! Woefear gleam she so glooming, this pooripathete I solde? Her beauman’s gone of a cool. Be good enough to symperise. more...

Fifteen years after his death, Robert A. Heinlein’s long-lost first novel is being published. Posthumous productions are generally disappointing, but Heinlein, in death, has amazed me before: The uncut edition of Stranger in a Strange Land is one of my all-time favorite reads. (I have what I think is a killer film adaptation rumbling around in my head. Perhaps someday I’ll let it pour out.)

If not, I highly recommend The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Just finished it. Don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it. Very funny, and in its own strange way, very, very deep.

The closest thing to it I can think of is Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. (What? Never read that? Imagine the product of an early 20th-century Irish Douglas Adams. Drool.)