blah blah blah BLOG

9/1/09

AUGUST, 2009: I’m planning for the new school semester, hoping it’s my second-to-last.  After checking my university account to see if our required texts were posted for the fifteenth time in the last week, I was surprised to see that they were in fact posted, and one of my courses required six different novels or short story collections.  I decided to check these out at the local library and get ahead before I started my full-time work / full-time school, semester of death.

Among the items I checked out were, Drown, by Junot Diaz, Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, Play it as it Lays, by Joan Didion, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie, and Libra, by Don Delillo.  After bringing them home and setting them down with a satisfying thud on my coffee table, I began to rifle randomly through the texts, wondering which of them I should read first.  I picked up Solomon, but to now avail.  I read maybe seven pages.  Next, I read through Tonto, and got through page 60 before deciding I needed a change of scenery.  I picked up Play it as it Lays.  I just couldn’t put it down again, until, feeling contemplative and a little disturbed, I set it back down again on top of the pile, finished, beginning to end.

I was able to read the entire novel in about 2.5 hours or less.  Even now, thinking back on the work itself, it seems a bit of a blur.  I cannot recall sharp details, only vague notions of movement and emotion, which is perhaps quite fitting to the novel and the way Didion would have wanted it to be.  I say this because the form of the novel is disjointed, a bit random and not a little haunting.  The emptiness.  It must be the emptiness that affects me so.  And Mariah (mar-eye-uh).  What happened to the modernly-tragic heroin?  Everything and nothing.

I loved it in spite of itself.