Tuesday, November 06, 2007

When '07 was still wet and yawping with its own birth, I'd had this idea I was going to map out the connections between all the books I read for the entire year. It was a little eerie how well the first handful of books I read commented on each other, spoke of each other or referenced or overlapped each other, either directly or indirectly. I never got the map started, because, whoa, hello, big project. Sometimes, though, I really wish I would have. Would have been neat.

It's moments like this, when I just finished reading Grant Bailie's new novel, Mortarville (which you ought to read if you're into the sorts of things I'm into), and then I moved on to At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. Bailie's novel is about John Smith, a guy who was born as the product of two mad scientists. Then I hit O'Brien's book, a book about a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book (in which his characters live with him in a hotel), and I just slammed into this line at a thousand words an hour:

The birth of a son in the Red Swan Hotel is a fitting tribute to the zeal and perseverance of Mr. Dermot Trellis, who was won international repute in connexion with his researches into the theory of aestho-autogamy. The event may be said to crown the savant's life-work as he has at last realized his dream of producing a living mammal from an operation involving neither fertilization nor conception.

And it's like: what? Wait. What?