LITERATURE: Reviews

I have to laugh; having turned Spinning more in the direction of writing and literature analysis and review, here I am reading lit journals that are a year old (I hope to catch up over the holidays, though having just finished the winter 2004 Ploughshares the other day, guess what came in yesterday’s mail?), Aristotle (with plans on moving steadily along through the centuries of these precious writings), there would be little hope of ever getting current enough to sign on for covering books as they are spit out by the publishers.

Just placed an Amazon order (yeah, I guess they’re my favorite bookstore, since I can "thumb through" and buy with the bonus of seeing exactly how my purchases are adding up with each click of the buy button, as well as not having to carry the weight of the books around as I browse) and aside from the Best American Short Stories of 2005, ordered Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

I believe I have already read this many years ago, but a quick search through my library shelves shows I don’t still have it around.  The main reason I’m reading it is for a reading group at our local library that I might like to join and Cannery Row is the novel scheduled for their December 29th meeting.  I’ll have to do some quick reading here, but I think that as with Alias Grace which took me just a week there is more story to the book than mystical meanings such as those in 100 Years of Solitude that had me reading a couple pages and then thinking about them for days.

Though I’ve not been able to stick to my five-at-a-time plan, two to three being the most managed under current conditions of that pesky reality that interfere with straight reading, I was most pleased to see the two stacks of books about 18 inches high of the "already read" pile.  Oh yes, I must also build more bookshelves somewhere to accomodate all these readings, the "to-be’s" as well as the "dones" so that I can maneuver the vacuum through the house.