Apropos of my book meme completion below, I must admit to being a fraud. I am frankly unfit to be responding to that survey. I wish it weren't true, and every few months I resolve to make it less true, but that doesn't change the basic honesty of the claim. I'm a bad book-reader. Non-fiction, sadly, has basically taken over my life. I've got a list of unread, fantastically fascinating books that's grown to two bookshelves long. I've got 10+ books in various stages of doneness now. And because I'm constantly being confronted with how much I don't know on this-or-that topic, I'm perennially playing infojunkie catch-up. Jeff Bezos sends me Christmas cards.
The result, unfortunately, has been an almost complete abandonment of fiction. Not only haven't I read the canonical greats, but I've no authority on the contemporary stuff either. It's not that I don't want to, or that I don't enjoy it, but my non-fiction obsession leaves me no time to inject anything that lacks direct relevance to my next post. It's really quite horrible. And don't even get me started on poetry. I'm all for the great work Roxanne's doing, but if it's not Saul Williams, I lack any ability to appreciate it. Not sure why this is -- I love hip-hop, I love slam, and I respect rhyming poets, but anything prose-based just flies right over my head.
