goodbye baseball

+ i have come to treat my bookshelves as a sort of bank account. i keep a balance of available books, i spend it through reading. i buy books to keep my balance up. or maybe a bomb shelter, or pantry. i monitor my supply, keep an eye on what i have on deck, what books i have lined up in the bullpen. i warm them up, a few test pitches. read a page or two from the middle somewhere, decontextualised, is this what i'm up for at this point in time.

i pull out old books, books i've read and dated, and check them, do i remember them? sometimes i don't. sometimes i have no idea what a book was, even though i've dated it, Oct. 2004

+ four new books today.

blood meridian, or the evening redness in the west by cormac mccarthy. i have not read his books before, but for some reason jan is collecting all these books of his. i'm curious, and it was in perfect condition.

blindness, by jose saramago. i remember, very vividly, looking at this in 1999 or so in a bookstore, along with don delillo's underworld. i was looking to expand past genre fiction and the books already around me, so i looked at the 'serious' shelves in the mall bookstore, the modern fiction. through cover art and clever synopses, those two stood out. i remembered don delillo, and tracked his books down by 2001, and now i have them all. i remembered blindness too, but i never bothered to track it down, somehow. there it was, today, and only $10.

peace shall destroy many by rudy wiebe. a mennonite author from saskatchewan, writing about a mennonite community on the prairies during world war II. written in 1962.

and this book by an author named terri jentz, called strange piece of paradise: a return to the american west to investigate my attempted murder and solve the riddle of myself, which is a great title. it's why i bought the book, i saw the title somewhere on the internet and then tracked down some reviews. at the bookstore, the guy said, 'that's a great book, really fantastic.' it really is a murder investigation, this woman's memoir of being attacked by a madman in an oregon campsite 30 years ago and trying, now, to figure out what the hell happened.

+ my favourite book from the summer to date is probably alex driving south, by keith maillard. a $2 'canadian classic' paperback from the discount bin outside bibliophile books on commercial. a vicious, fantastic little book. a day, and really a lifetime, in west virginia. an absolutely fantastic book.

+ at the baseball game, a home run, and they put the words up on the little screen, goodbye baseball!!. yeah, it's outta there. but we thought there was another home run, no, the ball just bounced of the wall, painted white. it disappeared, and then the play kept going, the ball came back to the infield, the runner stopped at first.