READING: Pure Drivel

This week's read:

Pure Drivel was released in 1999. It's 113 pages long. It took me 13 years to finish it. That should've been a red flag for me to just let...it...go.

I'm pretty sure it's illegal to dislike anything Steve Martin does. I mean, the blurbs on this book say things like "achingly innocent and astonishingly ironic," neither of which I'd necessarily use to describe this book. I like to connect to the characters in a book on a slightly obsessive level, and that's hard when you're reading stories where the narrator is, say, "Michael Jackson's Old Face."

So overall, I didn't love it. I got bored. But I did pick up a new neurosis from the last essay, "A Word from the Words":

When I was a computer word, things were great. I could blast through cyberspace, scroll across screens, travel to India. Now that I'm on the page, I'm worried that it's going to be mostly dark. My request to you...is that you occasionally open the book after you have finished reading it and give all of us a little air. A simple thumbing through will do.

Oh boy. I have a tendency to assign feelings to inanimate objects; for example, if there are only two cans of tomato soup on the shelf at the store, I'll buy both rather than leave one lonely. And do you remember the Ikea commercial with the sad desk lamp? That pained me. Don't make me feel sorry for the words trapped in my books! Especially when I have 200-some books sitting in my office. I'm going to go ahead and delete that whole passage from my memory, for sanity's sake.

Okay, off to start this week's book...