Side quest. (November 25)

LaVerle Spencer

So I have this stack of books next to my laptop that are specifically there because they’re too hard for me to just sit down and read. I chip away at them, bit by bit, looking up unfamiliar words, researching references to things I’m not familiar with, writing notes, struggling to process. Mind melters. Also cookbooks because I can’t read cookbooks at one go or I’ll die of gustatory temper tantrums.

They have to be in paper; I just can’t even begin to process this stufff in ebook format (although generally I prefer it; it’s easier to read in bed or the bath).

Yoga Anatomy is on the stack. Borges’s Selected Nonfictions. Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (new! and ouch!). Mary Anne Mohanraj’s A Feast of Serendib (also new! I bought new spices too because yay!). Writing this post, I went, “Oh, shit, I forgot about Goedel Escher Bach when I moved” so I tossed that on the pile too, because that’s how I roll: overkill.

But, on the very top of the stack, LaVyrle Spencer’s Bitter Sweet (a romance). The writing is so good that every time I open it, I want to spit nails.

This morning:

“And of course there were the barns, telling the nationality of those who’d built them: the Belgian barns made of brick; the English ones of frame construction and gabled rooves and side doors; the Norwegians’ variety of square-cut logs; the German ones of round logs; tall Finnish barns of two stories; German bank barns built into the earth, others half-timbered with the spaces between the timbers filled with brick or stovewood. And one grand specimen painted with a gay floral design against a red ground.”

Oh my god I’m a hack.

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