So one of my semi new years resolutions was to start keeping track of what I’m reading. This is what I’ve read so far. Looking back over January, it is obvious that I was incapable of reading anything unless it involved mystical gunslingers, pretty pictures, or chicklit. I think having endless colds in Dec and Jan left me unable to take on anything more complex. But now I have the new translation of Don Quixote. Quicksilver, which I started months ago continues to haunt me and I hope I will be able to get through it eventually, damn you Neal Stephenson!

I also just finished reading Larry Brown’s new book Rabbit Factory, which has everything you would want from southern fiction — drinking, dogs, fighting, police, failing marriage, amputees, bunnies, impotence, strippers, hit men, and a truck full of meat.
I always like novels that weave together stories from various characters points of view, this one had so many characters that were in crisis but the storyline didn’t get sentimental. Brown also has a surreal sense of humor, although this book is more tragically comic than anything else.

I just started reading Daniel Handler’s Watch Your Mouth. So far in the first 9 pages he starts using LC subject headings as an organizing principle for some of the introductory stories that take place at the beginning of the book, saying of these first stories:

“Their purpose is similar to those hyphenated taxonomies you can find clinging to the back of the title page like mold on a shower curtain, infecting your naked and vulnerable skin. You know the words I mean. I know deep down you know what I’m talking about. Those Library of Congress things.”

Now I’m not going to be able to see a LC subject heading without feeling itchy.