Diwali

I think I’m being honest when I say that only three books I have ever read I loathed. Two of them were classic high school selections with grand purposes and great expectations regarding ‘the potential to teach students something’ in ‘an accessible manner’. They were Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and A Separate Peace, John Knowles’s opus maximus. I don’t have reasons for either of these dislikes aside from, in the former’s case, a direct, illogical antipathy toward the author himself (he’s just an idiot and I can’t make myself consider him seriously) and, in the latter’s, my distaste for badly-plotted, horribly-narrated, awfully-uninteresting bildungsromane. A combination of the two is the reason for my unrelenting hatred of Education’s End, by the assholish Anthony Kronman, who is inept at making a case. I met Kronman a bit more than a year ago and did not have the courage to challenge him, afraid that I’d be much too disrespectfully scathing and certainly not in the mood to make me seem like the tube worm.

In 1999 my family and I had dinner with John Grisham. He kickstarted my temporarily-obsessive collection of coins and currencies by giving me a note of yen. John came over to our place a few times for other get-togethers and I’d show him my growing amassment after rubbing the coins with vinegar under hot water. I had no idea who he was.

Perhaps my favorite story is The Little Prince, by Saint-Exupéry.

Today I received Rumpus Women in the mail is why all of this came to mind. It’s looking quite amazing.