Books: an alternative to getting things done.

Over finals weekend and throughout finals week, I naturally made it a point to ignore the quickly-approaching deadlines and monstrous final projects looming in the back of my mind. Since I have no T.V. the next best alternatives were sleep or reading--both of which I indulged in quite gratuitously. I finished:

1) Augusten Burrough's latest book Magical Thinking

I want Augusten Burroughs to be my main gay. Having read Dry and Running With Scissors, Magical Thinking doesn't disappoint--I love his painfully honest prose and his ability to reflect upon traumatic and emotionally trying events with clarity and humor....and then there was that time he got back at his free-loading housekeeper by paying his court-ordered fine of a thousand dollars...in pennies. and the other time he sought vengeance upon telemarketers by asking one of them to send him a picture of his dick. hah. oh Augusten.
He's quite adorable. To top it off, he's got a penchant for revenge, he's unabashedly narcissistic, and the KING of passive-aggression (and he has two french bulldogs!!)--he's pretty much me if I were a homosexual white man. Actually, no--I give myself too much credit...I aspire to achieve his mastery of passive-aggression. In the words of Wayne, "I am not worthy."



2) Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections:
Where to begin with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. I loved it--I couldn't put it down--his beautifully written and excruciatingly detailed account of an American family in decline was so hard to look away from--for lack of a better idiom--like a car crash in slow motion. It is quite an ambitious novel--using a narrow focus (in this case, the Lambert family) to cast larger meditations on themes such as mediocrity, the American dream, the disintegration of the nuclear family, generational gaps, scholarly fads (particularly critical theory....aaaaah), clinical depression, self-medication in all its forms, the ethics of anti-depressants, late capitalism, suburbia, sexual frustration, retirement, assisted living, life insurance, suicide, social politics...the list goes on. The Corrections is a timely novel for the cultural age we live in. I was particularly intrigued by Franzen's character Chip, an academic who concentrates in literary theory. His character becomes disillusioned by the seeming irrelevance of theory in contemporary culture and the obsolescence of the humanities in general. I realized then that my feelings of inadequacy with my very "impractical" major stems from self-denial and my fear of my work and all that I am passionate about will amount to nothing of consequence. but then again, as I believe this book suggests, or at least brings to the table for discussion, the same can be said about life and purpose--that we are a part of a something larger. What I like about this book (and simultaneously frustrates me) is that Franzen avoids coming to any conclusions about the issues he's raised---although I think he makes some judgments--he tactfully avoids any pitfalls of preaching or airs of being "above" the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary American culture--the product of centuries of "progress." I have come to some conclusions, however--I don't want kids. I want to die when I am no longer completely sentient or have progressed so far along in a terminal illness that I am in constant pain or can not control my body. Does this make me pro-Kevorkian?