Monday, March 16, 2009

Currently Reading: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

OMG, YAWN. It's not a good sign when your dog destroys the book you're reading and you feel a sense of relief about it. The last time my dog chewed up a book I was reading, it was John Grisham's The Client, and I felt exactly the same way, like, "Oh, thank GOD, I don't have to waste anymore of my life wading through that DRECK." And back then, I was only 7 pages away from the ending. I'm currently on page 156 of Pessl's 514 page first opus - in hardcover - and I could kiss my dog for risking his digestive track to save me from the horror. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite as thorough as he could have been, and the damned thing is still readable. As I am a glutton for literary punishment, that means I must keep reading. But I don't know how much longer I can last. I've already reached the skip-mass-portions-of-text angry reading phase, and generally when that happens, there has to be something about the text to motivate me - an oft-repeated word or gimmick I can distract myself by counting its number of occurrences, for example. Unfortunately, Pessl isn't annoying in that way. I could count constructs in pretention, but the universe doesn't provide a number that goes that high, so I'll just have to keep pushing through the jungle of holy-crap-does-this-stink-or-what until I can't take anymore.

See you then.

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