booksSo I have stuff to do in the house but I really can't set this book down. Other than the forward and front matter, which I read last night, I've read nearly half of it today. I can't believe I'd never heard of this, and I think it might be in the group of books like "Owen Meany" and "Tao of Pooh" and "Winter's Tale" that I just want to go up to total strangers, grab them by the shirt, and scream 'you MUST read this!" The only reason that I'm online now is because I had to send a quote to a friend of mine, since it meshed pretty well with our discussion last week on how the minute you begin to write your memoir, it ceases to be non-fiction and instead becomes your current story of what happened and what it means. (Her words, mostly.) This is the quote:
"Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms."
-- Machado de Assis, Epitaph for a Small Winner (Memorias postumas de Braz Cubas). William L Grossman, trans. New York, 1952. (passage from Chapter 27.)
Anyway, just had to get that out. Going to go pour a glass of wine, take a nice long bath, and read some more.
bovisrex
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