LITERATURE: Up Next –

There are two that caught my fancy, and I’m likely to read a page or two of each before I decide, by mood alone, which will be the next read.

Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit is tempting, and I’d pulled it from the shelf before Jackson’s Hill House, but Hill House won out.  Possibly because I was in the mood for a quicker read (interrupted of course by fax machine setup problems) and for a mystery.  Babbit seems to be a deeper read, and this is what I’m in the mood for (while I still have a brain that’s operating at the higher scale of its limitations).

The other is Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.  You’ve gotta admit, that title just begs to be explored. 

Reading the opening lines, O’Brien’s simply cannot be halted and put back on the shelf:

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired in the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.  I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities.  One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.  A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

I’m smiling, I’m wowwing, I’m hooked.