Business has been good; too good perhaps. I have been carefully crafting my time to allow for creative endeavor and that has been, well, an endeavor. Anyway, I would like to return with something I do not think I have done here before...a book review of sorts.
Speaking of business, I have subscribed to The Economist and it has made me feel like Sisyphus. It is an excellent publication; it is impeccably written and has really made me aware of situations around the world outside of Florida. The problem is it is a weekly, full-length magazine and despite loading it to audio and listening to it while commuting, counting (for annual inventory at work), and just anytime I am waiting for anything to happen, I have fallen behind. By the time I finish one magazine, five more have arrived and are waiting for me, standing in line, or should I say queue, on the dining room table. This would not be so bad were it not a news publication where my old issues are by definition obsolete. One thing I have consistently enjoyed in The Economist has nothing to do with news or economics but books. In one such book review, the title in question was a curious Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. If the name alone does not spark your interest, check out the reviews on Amazon: they are polarized between laudatory admiration and outright disgust. This book is notorious for being over a thousand pages of writing that is predominantly stream-of-consciousness.
I'm ashamed to say I've never read James Joyce's Ulysses (a situation I would like to rectify in the near future) so this was my first introduction to a book written in this fashion. Now, I know what stream-of-consciousness is, my mind lives in it as all ours do, but I have never read a book like this. And to be fair I must say I have not read all thousand pages but merely the sample Amazon provides. This book engaged me and made me feel like I was intimately present in the life of someone else. You cannot get more intimate than to be amidst the unedited musings of another human being. This gives you that perspective and it does it well. It also speaks to some very uniquely twenty-first century American situations.
I hope to read the whole thing eventually and then I can comment further, these are but my initial takeaways. But for now, I will have to catch up with what was going on in the world two months ago in The Economist...
