the dewiest decimals

I finished The Glass Castle the other day and since then my evenings have lacked luster. I come home and feel I'm mourning for a lost world. My mother said I’d like the book, which meant I needed to think it over carefully, but she was right. It was hugely entertaining. Even at the end when we weren’t toughing out some horrendous circumstances anymore it remained interesting, mostly because of the whacky parents. All those years of bad hygiene, squalor, pluck and borderline criminality had my imagination swirling. I like that.

Yesterday I finished The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. After the ubiquitous hoopla, I found it a bit of a let-down. Yes, it is amazing that this book got written, but what was written in the book didn’t seem that amazing. I have the feeling this is one of those cases where the movie, the dramatization, is better than the book.

So, at the moment I’m reading Mothers of Invention. I am also still reading Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant, which I expect to finish sometime in 2011. And not that I don’t have enough unread books around to besiege, but I ordered more from Amazon today, mostly used:

The Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Somebody
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry
A Passion for Books by Harold Rabinowitz (?)
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson

The shipping costs add up, and I was going to cancel A Passion for Books, but a used hardcover cost $2.50, and I’ve seen many enthusiastic reviews. Ok, I’ve seen even more enthusiastic reviews of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. So who knows? If it’s a miss, my inner materialist says at least I’ll have a nice hardcover.