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January 23, 2005
my online absence
I've been busy reading, working and chilling with Ben, and I've fallen down on my online correspondence. Sorry about that.I've got a great line-up of books to read, coming out of Christmas. Already I've finished Life of Pi and Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which went by rather quickly. I'm also working on the debt-reduction book Pay It Down, but that one will stall for the next month while I record every penny I spend in a small notebook in my purse, so I can better understand my spending habits.Next: Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that uses extrapolation to try to flesh out some of the missing details from his life. Then I'll read The Smartest Guys in the Room, which will be the second book I'll have read about the Enron debacle. Last in my lineup is Under the Banner of Heaven, popular among my journalist friends and compared on the dust-jacket to In Cold Blood, so my hopes are high.Except for Life of Pi, these are all non-fiction books. From the age of 7, when I fell in love with reading, until I graduated from college at 22, almost all of the hundreds of books I chose to devour were fiction. I read heaps of non-fiction in my classes, of course, and generally enjoyed it. Still, it surprises me that my reading habits have changed so drastically in the past four and a half years. I think the low-quality of much of modern "literature" is to blame, sadly. Most of the fiction I've enjoyed over the past year or two has been around for a while -- Faulkner, Greene, Dostoyevsky. There are a lot of easy-to-read and entertaining new novels out there, but not very many with strong prose, good plots, and stimulating themes. The New Yorker has published a few good short stories by Japanese authors lately. Maybe after my current round of books I'll see if any of those authors' novels have been translated into English.Of course, maybe my turn to non-fiction is about more than the dearth of quality new English-language novels out there. Now that I'm out of school, maybe I've just taken it upon myself to continue learning as much as I can about everything in the world.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at January 23, 2005 12:21 PM