Because I did things like run errands and socialize this weekend -- this included watching multiple episodes of no fewer than four different makeover shows for a review, finally organizing my comic book collection by title in five separate storage boxes, and going to a fantastic, 14-person dinner on Saturday night at Glendale's campy-yet-delicious Damon's -- I am up to my eyeballs in books unread and TiVo treats unviewed.
The former include Warren Ellis's graphic novel Orbiter, which seems surprisingly non-gory, considering that Ellis's Authority and Planetary titles do not shy away from eight-panel collages comprised of fleshy gobbets and bloody puddles. I also picked up Neal Stephenson's The Confusion and got maybe 100 pages knocked off, and I'm still working through the book I started on the flight home from Chicago, David Starkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Hentry VIII.
(In the just-read category: John Mortimer's latest Rumpole book, Rumpole and the Primrose Path, Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, and James Twitchell's Living It Up: America's Love Affair with Luxury. I feel like I should promptly ditch the Merrie Olde England stuff so I might read Daniel Harris's Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, Juliet Schorr's A Consumer Society Reader, Robert Frank's Luxury Fever and Trading Up: The New American Luxury by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, thus completing my syllabus on material culture in the late 20th/early 21st century.)
And the TiVo is currently packed with Chris Rock's Never Scared, as well as The Animatrix.
I seriously doubt I'll see either before July -- we still have an entire season of Without a Trace to watch, plus all the new Sopranos episodes, and the entire Witch Hunter Robin run (that one, I'll be watching alone, as Phil does not share the love for anime). And I'm hanging on to Waking Life, since I can only digest that movie in ten-minute bites, slowly chewing on each scene.
Despite the backlog, I am almost giddy at the prospect of all these things to read and see. It's like storing fun! And it certainly beats the converse phenomenon, where you put off all your chores to the last minute.
I read Cute, Quaint blah blah blah but it made no impact on me whatsoever. It sort of had a barely developed master's thesis with an alcoholic advisor thing going on.
I am working my way through the The Natural History of the Rich: A field guide which seems like it might generally fit your theme and is pretty fun as well.
Posted by: marylynn | 2004.04.19 at 20:03
Excellent! I will pick that up post-haste. Or put it on my wishlist. Or maybe check to see if it's already on my wishlist. The point is, I will read it. Oh, yes. I will.
Posted by: Lisa | 2004.04.19 at 20:50
If you'd like to borrow/have either/or let me know as I can't ever read books twice and would otherwise just send them off to the library or something. None of my friends here would want to read them.
Posted by: marylynn | 2004.04.20 at 16:21