Hoppy, The One-Legged Bookworm

Apparently, Blogger is buggered right now (Sunday night), so I'm just typing this up for later, will post "for real" when they get their act back together...

Been doing a lot of reading lately. I just finished a re-read of Infinite Jest, which I didn't think I could bear to read again -- it's good, but does not end on an emotional high note -- and I'm glad I did: I picked up a lot more that I missed the last (two) times I read it, and I feel it was definitely worth the effort. I happen to have been reading David Foster Wallace's book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and it's amazing the parallels I see between the essays and Infinite Jest. Kind of funny, there are also somewhat disturbing ankle/surgery parallels between my recent life and the book, let's hope they go no further...

After that I picked up Cloud Atlas for a re-read, but I'm just picking: I'm really only interested in the second section of "An Orison of Sonmi-451." I'll probably go through it all anyway, but in the meantime I've been re-reading that anthology of Outside Magazine's best articles from their first 20 years. That works out nicely; each article, essay or story is just a bite-sized chunk, already perfect for book-nibbling.

Those Outside articles got me hankering for some more outdoor reading though, and I felt like a little nonfiction, so I just started up Cadillac Desert. Again, I think I'll just graze, skipping the less interesting chapters to just hit the stuff I like, even though I've already plowed through the Introduction and the first few chapters. (If I feel like fiction I may pick up Blood Meridian again as well, but that's kind of a fast read.)

Anyway, real life: went out again last night, back to Which Brew for dinner with my friend Greg. It was not quite as bad an ordeal as the night before (understandable, what with the St Patrick's day celebrations & whatnot), and this time I got chairs for both myself and my foot. One good thing about this whole ankle debacle is that I've actually lost about 10 pounds, even with the splint on my foot, and I think it's mainly due to the sudden drop-off in beer and bar food consumption, so I have somewhat mixed feelings about getting back out there... Saw Doug Hawke's new band; they sounded pretty good.

Other than that, nothing much is going on. I spent at least part of the day researching and pricing laptops, and I just prepared a crock pot of chili, put it in the fridge for cooking tomorrow.

I see that blogger's back, so I'll just slap this post down and then it's off to bed.