Verweile Doch
Oh to alight the captain's chair where I read like a drunken soldier - drunk on prose! After three busy weekends, this one presented itself as especially conducive to a long, varigated reads. I've lately not been too good at moving from book to book in a single evening, tending to linger too long in pollinating bliss at a single flower, but the excess of time allowed even Christopher Nolan's "The Banyan Tree", a novel as cryptic as Spanish blogger Hernan Gonzalez through the lens of Babelfish, to be enjoyed. Nolan uses nouns as verbs ("Manchestering?") and hues the print with delicious imagery. It began to taxiderm my eyelids, so dreamlike his prose, that I had to switch to Iris Murdoch's "Bruno's Dream" before Dickens' "Pickwick Papers", William F. Buckley's sailing adventures, "The Enemy Within", and finally a biography of Jefferson Davis.
It was a dizzingly joyous return to reading; when my wife got back from shopping I could speak in full sentences again. (The NBB - 'nothing but basketball' - on CBS had reduced me to grunts and nods and irregularly-spaced adrenalin flourishes.)
No comments:
Post a Comment