Thanks to the annual Super Bowl Sunday Buy One Get One Free sale at Books Etc. in Laguna Hills, the works of Bellow, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cheever, Eco, Grace Paley, Dennis Potter, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe have found their way onto my bookshelf for a capital outlay of only 32 dollars American.
As my son comes downstairs for dinner, he says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune –”
I finish it with him: “– must be in want of a wife.”
“We spent 45 minutes in class today analyzing that one sentence,” he says.
“It’s a very famous sentence,” I say. “The next sentence will probably go faster.”
ME: In the future it is neither necessary nor desirable for you to greet me every single time I walk in the door. Unless a minimum of two hours has passed, the previous greeting is still in effect. In other words, if I come IN the door, and you greet me, and then several minutes later I go OUT the door, only to return in a matter of seconds, you do NOT have to greet me again.
LEWIS: Ha-ha. Good one.
At hockey tournaments, especially travel tournaments, there’s a lot of down time between games. I usually bring a book to the rink so I have something to do. Nobody else does this. Nobody. In hockey circles, I’m known as the guy who brings books to the rink.
This weekend, we’re at a tournament in San Jose. One of the dads from our team — I think he’s a copier salesman — says to me, “I can’t understand why anyone reads fiction.”
He says it, not in a rude way, but not in a complimentary way either.
I say, “Oh. Well, I can’t understand why anyone lives his whole life inside his own head and never gets curious about what life looks like to other people.”
So I probably won’t have to talk to him the rest of the season.
Later the same day, this guy knocks back a couple of double Scotches at a team dinner and proceeds to make gay sex jokes — loudly — the rest of the evening.
Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “To-morrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”
Reporting from Searchlight, Nev. – A commotion unfolds in the tiny public library here as the staff searches for a copy of the memoir written by Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader and Searchlight native.
“Has anyone seen Harry’s book?” a librarian calls out.
A local patron grabs a trash can and peers inside: “It’s not where it’s supposed to be,” he says.
In his hometown at least, there seems to be little affection for Reid, whom some residents describe as a distant figure out of touch with local concerns.
If every person is to be banished from society who runs into debt and cannot pay–if we are to be peering into everybody’s private life, speculating upon their income, and cutting them if we don’t approve of their expenditure–why, what a howling wilderness and intolerable dwelling Vanity Fair would be! Every man’s hand would be against his neighbour in this case, my dear sir, and the benefits of civilization would be done away with. We should be quarrelling, abusing, avoiding one another. Our houses would become caverns, and we should go in rags because we cared for nobody. Rents would go down. Parties wouldn’t be given any more. All the tradesmen of the town would be bankrupt. Wine, wax-lights, comestibles, rouge, crinoline-petticoats, diamonds, wigs, Louis-Quatorze gimcracks, and old china, park hacks, and splendid high-stepping carriage horses–all the delights of life, I say,–would go to the deuce, if people did but act upon their silly principles and avoid those whom they dislike and abuse. Whereas, by a little charity and mutual forbearance, things are made to go on pleasantly enough: we may abuse a man as much as we like, and call him the greatest rascal unhanged–but do we wish to hang him therefore? No. We shake hands when we meet. If his cook is good we forgive him and go and dine with him, and we expect he will do the same by us. Thus trade flourishes–civilization advances; peace is kept; new dresses are wanted for new assemblies every week; and the last year’s vintage of Lafitte will remunerate the honest proprietor who reared it.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well–I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”
“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.
And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”
Reading a few pages of Vanity Fair — the book, not the magazine — before retiring for the evening . . . I say to my wife, “Man, this Thackeray guy is really funny.”
“Funnier than you?” she asks.
“He must be.”
“Why?”
“Well, this book is almost 200 years old and people are still reading it.”
“Imagine at the time he wrote it,” she says. “People probably laughed till they choked.”
“Exactly.”
Jerry Weinberg has been for almost 50 years the leader in considering software engineering not just as a technical practice but as a human activity. I’ve read seven of his books and with the exception of people I’ve actually worked with, I’ve learned more about IT from Jerry than from any other person.
He’s recently been diagnosed with what doctors say is a fatal illness. He has a CaringBridge site where he can read messages.
I can’t get interested in eBooks. My books are my friends. I also like the smell of books.
When I finish reading a book, if I liked it, I give it a new home with my other book friends. If I didn’t like it, I hurl it in the garbage. Can’t do that with an eBook . . .
I had a 40-percent-off coupon for Borders that expired today so we stopped by to see if they had any good computer books in stock, which they did.
At the checkout, the woman asked me if I’d like to get a recommendation for a novel.
“Yeah sure,” I said. I was pretty excited about the idea because I thought they’d look at my purchase history and figure out something I might enjoy.
Instead she recommended Home by Marilynne Robinson, which was displayed on the counter right in front of me.
“Are you recommending that just for me,” I asked, “or you recommend it to everyone?”
“We recommend it to everyone,” she said.
What a sham! “I’m going to pass on that,” I said. “There really hasn’t been a good female novelist since Jane Austen.”
My son, who was standing next to me, added, “And even she was kind of boring.”
My son and I went to Barnes and Noble in Irvine this weekend to buy the books on his 11th grade Euro Lit reading list: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Candide by Voltaire, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and The Stranger by Albert Camus.
“Have you read any of these books?” I asked the checkout girl.
“I’ve read Candide and Pride and Prejudice,” she said.
“Candide is fun. Virginia Woolf is kind of a downer though, isn’t she? Didn’t she kill herself?
“She did,” the girl admitted.
“Doesn’t that set a bad example for the kids?”
The Irvine store didn’t have the edition of Ivan Denisovich that the boy needed but the guy at customer service was able to call around and find a copy at the Aliso Viejo store.
The boy was beside himself: “We’re going to drive all the way to Aliso Viejo?!” (Aliso Viejo is a 9-mile drive from Irvine.)
“This will help you when you read the book,” I said. “You’ll have an appreciation for what suffering is all about.”
Hi everybody! It’s me, Lightning!
My owner’s son has this book for his AP U.S. History class. You should read it! The title — Don’t Know Much About History — makes you think of the famous song by Sam Cooke, so right away you want to know more about it!
History is fascinating! For example, did you know that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had ELEVEN pugs?! The Duke used to be the King of England but he had to “adbdicate” (that means quit) so he’d have enough time to walk all of his dogs.
I hope that fact is in the book!
— Lightning 
It occurred to him that what had seemed perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.
“But if that is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it — what then?”
