I
Read Odd Books

Dear readers, I came down with what can only be described as the plague. Mr Oddbooks brought home some conference crud and I watched a neighbor kid, and as we all know, kids are crawling with germs.   The neighbor kid’s germs morphed with the conference crud to create a supercrud.  My house may or may not be under a CDC tent.  So I haven’t been doing much but occasionally showing my ass in political communities and staring, stunned, at how much I really need to vacuum. I hope to have the “insane” and outsider literature discussion up on Friday, but given how things have been, it could be Friday, it could be three weeks from now.

Also, lots of people have been sending me books to read and I appreciate it. However, I am behind because of many reasons that have nothing to do with the plague but have everything to do with personal organization. So if you sent me a book and I said I would read it and discuss it, it will happen, in the fullness of time. The only exception would be if I began reading it and decided that even a crushingly horrible review would not be in your best interest. But that’s only happened once so I don’t see that happening.

In the mean time, let me share some links.

Here is the website of Gabriella Chana, a writer who thinks that she is genetically half Catherine the Great and half King David, who has a soul bond, or some such thing, to Brent Spiner, the dude who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Jesuits are keeping them apart, and she has a list of hot, Hollywood stars who want to marry her but all she can do is have mind sex with them. Gerard Butler, Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Jackman and Brent Spiner all long for her, evidently, but cannot marry her due to the Jesuits, though they somehow manage to leave awkward comments on her message board. Plan to devote hours to reading and reviewing Chana’s (aka Gail Chord) YouTube videos. I don’t know why George Clooney has yet to want to marry Chana, but I think it has something to do with the fact that he dates so much the Jesuits cannot keep him in cloned women that have babies to force him to marry them. Thanks to Ted the Romanian for this enormous time suck. Truly lunatic, so lunatic that I feel like it has to be a hoax but it probably isn’t.

Less involved but equally demented (though definitely not a hoax) is this site devoted to the theory that Stephen King killed John Lennon. There’s a book about it and you can be sure that I will be reading this book. Well, it’s actually a booklet, but it seems worth a read. I can only imagine that the reason that Stephen King has not sued the man behind this site is because the theory is so devoid of anything approaching reality that there was really no reason to shut him down. But I found it pretty interesting so you may, too.

Hopefully, this trend of being sick constantly is coming to an end and I can get stuff moving here. Clearly I am not a stoic who can work through such things. I’m pretty sure I would have been one of those people who died very young before antibiotics, vaccines and a modern infrastructure that supports the weak. Bear with me, please.

You know, I am not sorry that I decided to discuss Anders Behring Brevik’s mass murder manifesto. From what I could tell, with the exception of a handful of other writers, notably Jim Goad, no one else who discussed it actually read it. I read it, reacted, and some people found some value in it and that is awesome. Some people did not find value in it and opened up interesting dialogues with me. That too is awesome.

Less awesome is the sort of malaise I feel since writing it. I’ve had e-mails that, were I the snitching sort, would have given FBI agents a twitch in their loins (I’m only exaggerating a little here…).  A friendship ended (I think) over my liberalism.  And I am still getting e-mails from people who just wanna talk about the pros and cons of mass murder based on race hate.  All of that sucked and the sheer weight of all that hate and misery has stayed with me longer than it should have and it has made me reluctant to blog, to discuss books, or even to read much aside from little snippets here and there online.

I seem to be coming out of it though, and the sort of crankiness borne from being reminded that half the world will always want to kill the other half is lifting a bit. The weather is cooler, my mind is focused on more positive ideas and I’m avoiding politics until the last bit of black rage that came from people telling me that teenagers deserved to die at the hands of a madman subsides. As of this moment, there is not much left and I can feel the desire to discuss books returning.

So come back next week. I plan to discuss a fascinating book about schizophrenia called Demons in the Age of Light by Whitney Robinson. It will be another of my long, quote-laden discussions, and in a way I could not have expected, writing about the book is helping me clear out a lot of the angst writing about Anders Behring Brevik caused.

So until 11/2 or 11/3, give me a comment about what you’ve been reading. Let me know if there are any books you’ve been anticipating. Any other media you’re into? I myself have been caught up in Boardwalk Empire and have been reading Richard “Tin Man” Harrow and Jimmy Darmody fan fiction because that sort of user-generated madness is strangely reassuring to me at the moment. It never does anyone any good to compare lunacy but it helps to know I am not the craziest crazy online.

So share, and tune back in after Halloween.