Thursday, July 12, 2007

I (finally) (regretfully) finished A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories tonight. Seriously, I have such a huge literary crush on Flannery O'Connor right now, it's maybe a little ridiculous. How did I make it all the way to this year without really reading her stuff? What is wrong with me? And how long will it be before my "I'm going to take my time and read her stuff slowly and spread out over time so I can savor these first impressions for as long as possible" attitude turns into "I'm reading everything she ever wrote right now now now"?

I've also just started sampling some of Faulkner's short stories, from the Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner, where I'm experiencing that same attitude transformation. I picked up the collection because I wanted to read some Faulkner but couldn't decide which novel(s) I wanted to commit myself to. (Dude wrote like 600 of them. And they're all the same universe! Dude, like, invented Stephen King.) So I figure, short stories, right? Bite size Faulkner. Yeah, now I'm like, "Would it be so bad if I just read the whole 900 page collection, ah, tonight?" I'm guessing the answer would be both "Yes" and "Oh but God, no, no, no." Sigh. Conundrum.

One commitment I do plan to make is to spend this weekend reading Remainder by Tom McCarthy. Combine the fact that people I respect are flipping out over it, with the fact that I was crazy-hooked by the opening paragraph in the store, in that "Take to register, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars" way, and you get one anticipatory reader. Also, toss in the fact that it's been nearly two weeks since I finished Don Quixote, and don't get me wrong, I love reading short stories, but, going two weeks without spending any time reading a novel is for me perhaps a bit like going four hours in the morning without getting that first precious cup of coffee: possible, plausible, and occasionally a good idea, but certainly not an activity anyone who knows me would advise me to make a habit of.