4 more books--which makes it 29. 2.9 a week....need to pick up the pace.

double targets---atwoods book of nonfiction, compulsviey readable, tenedr and kind in the right places (to marian engel, mavis gallant,carol sheilds--can lit as convent); w/o the bitchyness that invades those places) wickedly funny, bone stupid on sci fi (absurdist taxanomic somersaults mostly); wise on the nature of place and lit (including a really thorough gutting of wordsworth's view of nature)

a collection of 20th century potraits--mostly english actually, with a really bizzare basquit drawing near the back, mostly useless except it reminded me of format for 100/100 and it had a good couple of qoutes.

nick hornby song book--he is really good in places (its about the songs and labums that made his life---and its anecdotal power is strong (what he says about his son with autism, esp.) and he actually tries a critical revival of rod stewart--but its mostly too sentimental.

and a strange, fractured, unfettered alberto manguel, the master anthologist and critic--who recorded his reading for a year--tangetial, chatty, deep, funny and sexy---and it has the best lists ive read in a long time (of dectivtive fiction, of what he finds beautiful in argentina, it was like best of blog writing (nb: blog precedents:letter collections, epherma, broadsheets, diaries, common place books, horn books, pillow books, samplers)--i have some long notes on teh book---one of the best ive read so far this year:

Bakr Al-Saybb:
my room
my room
is vaster then my
tomb shall be

(he qoutes this as he compiles a library in a new place)

the anonymous reviewer of Lady Chatterlys Lover who, in the English magazine Horse & Hound, remarked that Lawerence's book contained five descriptions of the British Countryside, unfortunatley marred by certain sentiment or erotic digressions. (24)

I read yesterday in Max Brods biography that Kafkja disliked Balzac and had noted with disapproval the motto Balzac had engraved on his walking-stick: ... (I shatter every obstacle). Kafka then added his own motto "Evey Obstacle shatters me" (55)

A few days afte the tragedy, I heard of someone who had rapped that morning inside a bookstoe close to the World Trade Center. Since there was nothing to do but wait for the dust to setle, he kept on browsing through the books.... (he teases us here, not telling us what the man browsed thru) (71)

Julien Green says that, in the eighteenth century in Scotland, the word wrath kept coming up so frequently in the pulpit that a certain printer of sermons, having exhausted his rovision of Ws, was forved to use two Vs instead. (71/2)

I know Him that i've heard him mentioned, but we're not on such intimate terms that we'd play billards together. (74) (Courteline on God)

What the dective story is about is not murder, but the restoration of order
PD James (96)

...The boys misfortune, as Sancho intuits, affects u all, not in the phyiscal pain, of course, not in the empty stomach and the flogged skin, but in the realzaiton that injsutice thruves and that we (apparently) condemend o the mpossibity of overcoming it. (on his don q chapter) (168)

War sems at teh same time imminet and yet impossbile. The view of the conflict offered by the European newspapers is merely allegorical: American power n the shae of a wilful monster attacking other mosnters. Since we dont believe in dragons, the allegory is useless. An editoral in he Lonond Daily Telegraph tells that the Wold Economy requires the War Machinery" We are in the realm of ornamental capital letters. (187)

God reveals in utter lcarity that which we cannot understand; that which we can understainhd He lays out in the riddles."
apocryphal book of devotion

Tommas Ely Martinezs told me that the actress Norma Aleandro was once visiting a ranch somewhere in PAtagonia. The wealthy landowenrs, proud of their property, displayed for her many of thir treasures:valuable paintings, cermaics, books. Encouraged by Alendro's poite enthusuasim, her hosts said they should show herfavourite peice, and put a small copy of Goethe's poems in her hand. Aleandro commented on the soft , delicatly tooled binding. "Yest thats it." they saif, its bound in human skin" (153)

Hand over cash and soon you have t hem in irons
Rosseau

Freud owned a copy of Gentleman prefer Blondes