Wednesday, November 16, 2005

I'm sure everybody who's anybody will be linking to this, but The Mlllions gets credit for being the first blog I saw to point to the winners of the National Book Awards, which were announced tonight. William T. Vollmann took the award for fiction, but who really cares about that, because I started reading Mary Gaitskill's Veronica tonight (which was also up for the award), and it's good, real good, in a real weird way. It's heady and dizzying. It's a real sentence-level book; the sort where it maintains a pretty constant tone, then slips a sentence into your drink that knocks you on your ass, even if you don't realize it's happening. It's also not a book I should be reading as tired as I am, but exhausted or not I needed to dive into it tonight. So dive I have done, and shall continue to do, until I pass out, which I expect to happen in about fifteen minutes.

Oh, and yes, this all means I (finally) finished The Plot Against America, which became definitely much more gripping in the final third than it was in the first two thirds (where it was still pretty generally gripping overall). Bonus trivia: What do Roth and Vollmann have in common? Answer: performance-enhancing drug use!