Books

Today I traveled back to Eugene to pick up my resuscitated laptop, which was lobotomized yesterday with a new hard drive. I wondered if it recognized me, but I thought that it probably didn't after all of its trauma, and that it was probably just as well anyway, because it is never a good idea to upset a machine, and especially not a machine that has witnessed so many of your most formative moments, whether it can remember them or not.

Since I dropped it off on Saturday, there has been constant freezing rain, which has kept me in my cabin reading books. I normally don't think that much about books, but with this computerless cabin-bound existence, there is not much else but fire and books, which go very well together, as long as they don't get too close.

I have been wanting to read some Faulkner, so I visited the Smith Family bookstore in Eugene. I asked the clerk if they had just received a big shipment, but she said that no, that is always how it looks in there. This confirmed my intuition that there are many books.

I would like it if somebody worth emulating would give me a list of the 100 books that I need to read, in order to push and poke at my stiff sense of self until I am larger and more dynamic, expanded like a rubber balloon in 100 directions by 100 well-expressed world views.

With such a list, I would have no problem with a computerless cabin-bound existence, and I would never venture back to the swampland of the Smith Family bookstore, nor any other wetland like it, trudging through printed sprawl to look for pearls.