Break On Through

I got about half way through Special Topics in Calamity Physics before I hit the proverbial brick wall and got that soaring headache that accompanies too close a reading and forcing myself to pay attention. It's not that the book is bad - it really isn't at all! It's actually one of the best books that I've read in quite some time. But, at a soaring 515 pages, it's not one of those books you read all in one sitting, as I originally set out to make it. The parenthetical comments galore, the frequent annotations, and the voracious side notes make the book less of a walk in the park and more of a slog through the swamp of academia. But the charactes and PLOT(!!) keep me reading, page after page, and chapter after chapter. Another interesting aspect of the game is to read each chapter title and try to figure out what each title has to do with the contents of that chapter. I mean, it sounds dull, but sometimes the real relation can be a stretch!

But anyway... I have, possibly unexcusably, taken a small break from the loveable tome that is Special Topics for some lighter reading. I recently picked up a book from the library entitled Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by one Mr. Chuck Klosterman. I'm only about half way through the first chapter, but I already believe this man to be somewhat of a comic genious. Within the first thity pages, he has attacked not only Coldplay, but John Cusak in Say Anything, Woody Allen, Sid and Nancy, and Teen Wolf. It's brilliant, and there are few parenthetical comments or annotations! And though I do feel bad about the fact that I am reading two books at the same time, I just can't put them down now!