Currently reading
Take Down
Leading an Inspired Life
Shadow Of The Titanic
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
The Emperor's Blades
Grave Peril
Words of Radiance
11/22/63
Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
Words I Wish I Wrote: A Collection of Writing That Inspired My Ideas
I sit back in my chair, tossing the book a good five feet onto the coffee table with that trademark thump that only hardcover book can make. It skids to a stop, hanging precariously over the edge. "This should have been called Words I Wish I Wrote So Much That I Put Them Into a Book Under My Own Damn Name Anyway," I mutter.
"Soooo you liked it?" my wife asks wryly.
"Well, it's nothing new or more enlightening than what you'd find on a million quote sites around the Internet or even on GoodReads," I blurt, close to whining. "But hey, I guess I have to cut the guy a little slack, I suppose. The book came out in 1999, prior to the Internet really taking off. How was Flughum--"
"Fulghum," my wife gently corrects me as she looks over curiously at the book's jacket design.
"FULGHUM, sorry. How was he to know how commonplace this practice would become for thousands of bored meatheads around the world brightening the whole of cyberspace one pithy quote at a time."
"Boy, you're in a mood! Anyways, it couldn't have all been bad. You even quoted a few of them to me. Like that Bowles one, was it? That one about infinite tomorrows or something...?"
I pick the book up again and thumb to the passage in question. "… we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well," I read. "Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
I close the book and place it back on the table, this time more quietly.
"Okay...I'll admit that a couple of them struck a chord with me but they aren't something you can't get today for free elsewhere."
The air hangs with a kind of damp silence. Off in the distance a dog barks. I reach for another book.
