Currently reading

For some reason the past few weeks I've been skipping back and forth between several good books:

The Autobiography of Mark Twain: It's as fun as his fiction. I guess I should have expected as much, but the way he hides hilarity within what at first appears to be a rather plodding paragraph is rather stunning. For instance, near the end of a paragraph which if skimmed one might assume to be a fairly traditional I-remember-as-a-child-doing-such-and-such, Twain writes, "When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it."

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Jose Saramago): Seems as different a novel from Blindness as could be, except for the spare paragraph-ization. I'm interested to compare it to Jim Crace's Quarantine, which offers an alternative imagining of Jesus' early years.

I've also started Don DeLillo's Libra and a book of essays by David Foster Wallace called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

I'll blame this bit of literary schizophrenia on the unsettledness of moving across the country these last few weeks, along with the pleasure of having a public library three blocks away now.