image from flickr.com, user vince&allyn
What I read this past week:
“John Henry Days” by Colson Whitehead
“Y: The Last Man” (Vol. 5-10) by Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, etc.
“Lyrical and Critical Essays” by Albert Camus
“The Commitments” by Roddy Doyle
Alright, so normally on this blog I’d spend the next 250ish words writing about those books or at least one of them (the more likely option, of the two). But, not today! Right now is the time for introductions, or at least a description of what this blog will consist of and my reasoning behind it.
This blog is going to be about what I read. Kind of boring, right? But it totally won’t be because, 1) I’m a pretty marvelous writer and 2) I read a lot of books. How many? Well, just look at the list up there. And that’s just one week! Granted I didn’t finish all of them–what’s the fun in that–but I did pick them all up and get at least fair way into them.
There’s two reasons I read as much as I do. First of all, I don’t sleep well and rather than spend hours upon hours laying in bed staring at the ceiling contemplating all of the many missteps of my life, I read. Secondly, I’m about as fickle a reader as they come. Some writer, Nick Hornby perhaps, wrote that if a book doesn’t grab you by page 50, you should drop it. Now, this isn’t particularly fair, but have you seen what’s out there to read? There’s enough stuff out there to fill a few dozen libraries! And supposedly some of it’s even good. So I do just that, if it doesn’t catch me, I move on to the next book, in hopes of falling in love.
image from flickr.com, user firstcuts
With all this reading going on, and my inflated perception of the value of my own thoughts, I’ve decided to blog about it. So that’s exactly what I’ll be doing for the next few months, or at least until I grow bored, lose the plot, and start blogging about my favorite types of Japanese brush pens. Or something like that. Until then though, it’ll be like a map of my reading journey. Except nowhere near as lame as that sounds.
Oh yeah, next week expect something about “John Henry Days.” I’m only on page 30, but it seems good so far.
–Bryan Hood
P.S. The original title to this post was, “What Up, Bitches?,” but I decided to save the insults for a real post.
[editor’s disclaimer: Bryan says these images are for free association. We think he’s crazy, but that’s why he’s writing for us. –JERK]
JERK 