It's been a long month of traveling - FL, NYC, IN, and what seems like it must be more.

It eventually caught up with me, as I took cold this week. Which gave me a couple days of recuperative time to catch up on some reading at last. In no certain order, and incomplete for the past several weeks...

Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany is like the appeal of reading the old Reader's Digest at the optometrist's office. Bits and pieces of light humor and pleasure, bite sized. Worth picking up.

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi is the second volume of her biographical study of her growing up in Tehran and beyond. The obvious comparison is probably to Maus, but this is somehow more personal and less academic. The bold and woodcut style of Satrapi's pen makes the darkness of revolutionary Iran that much darker - and the blank masks worn by the enforcers of the revolution is a fine touch.

Che Guevera's The Motorcycle Diaries : A Latin American Journey is the basis for the Walter Salles film of the same name. However, the story of the film is an artful compression and expansion of events as told by Che - many of the events in the film must come from sources outside the book, or are combinations and reorderings of events as told by Che. This is fine - the movie becomes in many ways more inspiring to social consciousness than prose of Guevara himself. Truth be told, to my ears it has some moments of beauty, some inspiring bits, but other portions become dry recitations of events out of context. In the telling, Salles should be praised.

While in Bloomington this past week, the following conversation occurred:

A: I know you like it and all, but I don't understand why you have to read science fiction. Why don't you read something normal people read?
E: Like what?
A: Like Sartre?
E: Ah. Sartre, which all normal people read....

And so I walked out of the used bookstore with:

Ah, normalcy!

Posted by esinclai at March 20, 2005 06:35 PM |