Book overload is near

I’ve been buying a lot of books lately, so there is a danger that my bookshelf will be filled to overflowing and the books will have to be stored elsewhere. I don’t know if that’s really disorganization, but it is lack of discipline. It’s not like I buy rare books that someone else will snap up. I could buy them later, when there is again room on the shelf.
I’m just not a naturally organized person when it comes to physical things. I think too many people see a correlation between an organized room and an organized mind. To me the latter is essential; the former is a nice to have.

See more progress on: get more organized

Update

We visited my son almost a month ago. It went very well and we had a good time. He and I still chat via the internet almost daily and we exchange email regularly.

We will be visiting my daughter in two weeks. We don’t communicate as ofter, but it all seems to be going well between us. We are facebook buddies.

See more progress on: stay close to my children

Swann in Love

I’d read it about a dozen years ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. Now there is a new edition of the translation, so I bought the paperback version and again, enjoyed it thoroughly.
I’ve tried in other place to write long, Proustian sentences that slalom across the page. They were long, but obvious parodies. Good for a laugh and nothing more.
Proust must have been the world’s keenest observer. And the world’s biggest neurotic; the worries with which Swann and the narrator torment themselves are truly brilliant in their craziness and truth to reality.
I plan to read the other volumes over time.

See more progress on: Read more great books

Proust

About 15 years ago I read the first volume of the old two volume Moncrieff translation.It was slow going, but I enjoyed it. I would read at least 10 pages per day, at around 6:30 a.m., in the family room, with the gas fireplace glowing: I live in a part of the world where we have long, cold winters, when the sun doesn’t rise until after 8 a.m. long after I have arrived at my office at work,a black coffee nearby to warm my innards, while Proust’s sinuous sentences unwound themselves before my eyes and my inner eye saw hawthorns and I could almost smell the aroma of the chicken that Francois was turning on the spit for the family’s Saturday lunch, always taken an hour early on that particular day,until I was so hungry that I went upstairs and made myself some bacon and eggs, because I was on the Atkins diet, which helped me lose 30 pounds but shot my cholesterol level to such heights that, a decade and a half later, I am still taking a lipitor daily.
Last week, while on vacation, I wandered into a book store and found the new revised paperback of Swann’s Way, and on a whim, bought it and can’t put it down. The flow, the detail, the ironies and side issues. Formidable!

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Illywhacker

I don’t know if this is a great book, but it’s really good. The novel tells the story of a 139 year old con man whose life parallels the development of Australia from the beginning of the twentieth century. The only problem is that, because it is told by a con man, how much can we believe what he tells us? Of course, this is the question that all books raise.

See more progress on: Read more great books