what i'm not reading

With respect to the fact that most of the books about teenagers i was reading were written by people my age (all references in the jessica darling books were to john hughes movies and other niagra falls areas)i tried to read shut the door but it's terrible. which makes me feel better and worse. you want the sixteen year old to have written a good book, but she didn't even if she did get it published. it reads like bad melodrama and none of the characters are well realized. in the end, it's just boring and obvious, but that's maybe because it's something like i might have written at that age, although i wouldn't have known the stuff. it wasn't in the books i read and i wasn't picking up boys at the mall.


The talked about it book of the fall, as told to me by Moriah Cleveland and the New York Times, is Special Topics in Calamity Physics and i'm not sure that i'm buying it, either. i'm on page 75 and still annoyed at her tick of annotating everything. it's a joke, clearly, relating the the narrator's academic father, but we don't need annotations everytime someone references a book or a movie. we know them, and getting the reference is half of the joy of reading that stuff. (i once tried to read the recognitions using the annotations and realized i was ruining it for myself. sure, i needed a bible and a dictionary, but check check checking everything out was ruining the actual story of the story. See Infinite Jest.) i think somewhere in there is one of those really lovely and fun books, like the Secret History, but she's making me work so hard to read it, i read Paul LaFarge's diatribe on Dungeons and Dragons in The Believer instead. Lately, due mostly to a conversation with Andres Debuffet in between back to back director's cuts of the Lord of the Rings movies, when he explained being a comic who performed all the time but didn't get paid was like starting off as a wizard in D&D instead of a warrior (or whatever the jocks in D&D are): through experience points the wizard ends up a whole hell of a lot more powerful in the end. I'm not sure that it's working of him or any of the other comics (or unemployed fiction writers, for that matter) that i know. But it did reevaluation my appreciation for D&D. Like my father's appreciation for spectator sports, "You don't know how it's going to end, it hasn't been decided for you." That’s what got me into watching sports: not the athlecticism or the physical challenge, but the story: this guy wants to beat that guy because that guy used to beat him. Or whatever. D&D is all about story. It’s just an adventure tale for boys (usually the kind that I like, who like novels and art and movies about dragons) the way playing house or dolls or dress-up is for girls. Sure, as a kid, maturing away from that stuff too slowly, we tried to distance ourselves from it, but now I realize my need to anthropomorphize everything, the way I feel I’m hurting my broken down Specialized Rock Hopper by trading it in for a road bike, has only to do with seeing stories in everything, even inanimate objects.