A rare solo visit to the Greenpoint library a few days ago gave me a second to thumb through the new arrivals in the adult section.  i immediately had a stack of about 10 books, including Barton Seaver’s For Cod and Country: Simple, Delicious, Sustainable Cooking; The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People.  Make That Ten.  The Tweets of Steve Martin [yep–that’s all one title]; Olivia Harrison’s George Harrison: Living in the Material; The 2012 Pushcart winners; Arundhati Roy’s Walking With Comrades; and Roberto Bolano’s The Last Interview.

i narrowed the pile down to the last two, justifying them as subway reading–a crucial category, because if i do not have something really compelling to read on the train i will sleep through my stop every time,. i tore through the Bolano; about to begin the Roy.

A few highlights from Bolano:

“In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book.  A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them.  A library is total generosity” (48).

“For me, the word ‘writing’ is the exact opposite of the word ‘waiting’.  Instead of waiting, there is writing.  Well, I’m probably wrong–it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise” (62).

“That’s more important than writing it [poetry], don’t you think?  The truth is, reading is always more important than writing” (67).