Having just finished Peter Carey’s latest novel, Theft, I have mixed feelings.
I liked the book, and simultaneously, found it… difficult.
First off, in the “liking it” department, well… it is Peter Carey!
You don’t win the Booker Prize twice by writing poop even once! He is an incredibly good writer.
I loved his Oscar & Lucinda, and My Life As A Fake.
But this one, Theft. I did not love it, per se. I liked it.
Hand it to Carey though, he trusts his reader! He just didn’t count on the likes of me showing up!
I needed help. Parts of it got away from me, like a lifejacket floating out of reach, and I often had to rely upon my Reading Partner to haul me into the boat, as it were.
Theft is sub-titled “A Love Story” and it is!
The story of Michael Boone, an ex-“really famous” painter, born 1943, in Bacchus Marsh, Australia. [← As was Carey himself, in both time and place. Let the reader interpret!]
Newly divorced and down on his luck, Michael retreats to the unoccupied house of his patron, Jean-Paul, in an effort to here, perhaps re-invent himself.
With him is his near-autistic brother Hugh. Michael takes care of Hugh in lieu of the only other option, which would be abandoning him to an institution.
And so Michael sets out out to work on a series of new paintings.
But into this peaceful backwoods setting, a beautiful woman appears one rainy night, her car stuck in the mud.
28-year old Marlene Cook is not only vivacious, but also an art expert.
Michael soon discovers she's married to the son of the now-deceased 20th-century artist, Jacques Leibovitz, and is involved in the authentication of Leibovitz’s works.
Michael has been a fan of Leibovitz since his high school years.
Needless to say, his interest in Marlene knows no bounds!
Soon he will wish there were bounds to his interest, as she involves him in a web of thievery and chicanery that threatens all he has ever stood for, in the production of authentic, genuine ART!
Not to mention, he loves her. And she, him, apparently.
Scamming, double-crossing, faking, severe cheatitry.
In many ways, this novel is rip-roaring good. Roller-coastery good!
Funny, too.
In style, Carey is as subversive and non-generic as ever. The narration alternates, chapter by chapter, between Michael and Hugh. Hence, we are given dual perspectives of simultaneous events, and this keeps the reader [if the reader is me] fully engaged and on the edge of their seat. Or the edge of the boat, as it were.
But a few times I fell into the lake.
I got a bit lost in the intricacies of exactly what is done in the art world as presented, regarding counterfeit painting and related forgery activities. I think that Carey is counting on a real savvy reader here.
It’s not the kind of book you read while driving a tractor along a straight furrow. Or while stirring a pot of soup with one hand and changing a diaper with the other.
You’re just not going to get it unless you are paying attention.
Throughout the book this one sentence is, themewise, center-stage:
How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?
Hmmm…. a good question. As for me, I like to pay nothing!
My own walls are filled with laminated posters I stole from Starbucks, so what do I really know about the higher realms of art?
Because I needed a friend with this book, I suggest it as a Reading Group selection. In the multitude of voices, this book has gemstone potential.
Getting your paws on your own authentic and legally-obtained copy of Theft is as easy as doing THIS!
Or,
READ AN EXCERPT!
Cheers,
Cip**********
Well, tonight is a big night for Hockey in Ottawa!
In just minutes from now, a very crucial Game 3 against the Anaheim Ducks will be under way!
← Our netminder, Ray Emery, is going to have to be every bit as sharp as he was in the last game. A game which the Senators lost 1 – 0, but in which Ray’s goaltending was superb!
Ottawa’s offense needs to step it up a notch or two.
Or three.
As in, score some goals!
So… I am just about to saunter off down Sussex Street, making my faithful way to the Jumbo-Tron at City Hall to watch tonight’s game along with about 10,000 other rabid fans!
If Ottawa loses this game, well [how does one say it]…. it will be sort of DIRE!
Yes.
Dire!
They will be down 3 games to zip, and the only remaining task will be to begin carving out tombstones!
Tonight... it's do or dire! But I have faith! Yes, I do!
They have home-ice advantage. 20,000 screaming fans, salivating for a win!
They are in their own barn tonight!
TIME TO DEAL WITH THE DUCK SITUATION ON THE FARM!
I will be back later, with a post-game comment!
Hang on, Ray! You can do this!**********
THEY WON THE GAME!
It was a lot of fun being amongst so many fans... total excitement.
Every so often the cameras would show an aerial shot of the crowd in front of City Hall and a huge cheer would erupt!
So they did it!
They won the game 5 - 3 and now the series is at 2 - 1 in favor of Anaheim. Next game is Monday evening when I think that I will again go to City Hall, weather permitting.
Well, it was a great game and I am all tired out!
Way to go Sens!
**************
Today, June 1st, marks TEN YEARS of renting this penthouse apartment.
Before this I paid rent elsewhere, assuredly yes, but I am just thinking today of how long ten years is!
Like at this one address.
I mean, it’s damn near a decade!
120 months of robbery by consent!
RENT!
Rent is craziness.
No wonder the word can also mean “torn”… for I have had well over $$ one hundred thousand dollars $$ untimely ripp't from me in the past decade!
Gone, gone, gone!
So, as I sit here at Starbucks© musing upon such things, I compose a few whimsical lines on the subject.
The subject of….
Rent
I dare you to find among things winged or hooved
A more nutty idea, a thing so far removed
From basic common sense. You can’t do it!
Even oxen would would throw off their yoke and eschew it.
Ask the busiest of lads, [I refer to the beaver]
That steady, stick-carrying, over-achiever.
He does what he does for one reason. To own!
When’s he’s done the damn dam the damn dam is his home!
And the chickens and bees, daily robbed of their labours
Know it’s only because they’ve got humans for neighbours.
So it’s not from compliance they continue their striving
But in faith and in hope they keep laying and hiving.
And the horse, does he willingly hitch to the carriage?
To be told who to woo, who be given in mare-age?
No. There’s only one reason he bends to the plow.
It’s the bit in his mouth puts the sweat on his brow.
Surely man’s the dumb beast, and for instance, take me.
Month by month giving money that I’ll never see,
To a landlord unseen. And he makes his own home
With the fortune I’ve traded for what I’ll not own.
© Ciprianowords Inc. 2007
The poet Diagoras of Melos was perhaps the most famous atheist of the fifth century. Although he did not write about atheism, anecdotes about his unbelief suggest it was self-confident, almost teasing, and very public.
He revealed the secret rituals of the Eleusinian mystery religion to everyone and “thus made them ordinary,” that is, he purposefully demystified a cherished sacred rite, apparently to provoke his contemporaries into thought.
In another famous story, a friend pointed out an expensive display of votive gifts and said, “You think the gods have no care for man? Why, you can see from all these votive pictures here how many people have escaped the fury of storms at sea by praying to the gods who have brought them safe to harbor.”
To which Diagoras replied, “Yes, indeed, but where are the pictures of all those who suffered shipwreck and perished in the waves?”
A good question.
Diagoras was indicted for profaning the mysteries, but escaped. A search was put out for him throughout the Athenian empire, which indicates that the charges were serious, but he was not found.
-- Excerpt from Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht –
Have a great Friday!
********
I guess I am still in mourning over
last night's loss by the Senators!GO SENS GO!
Have a great Thursday!
Well, tonight is a very important night for the Ottawa Senators.
In the last game, Anaheim had their number, and the Sens are now down a game in the series.
1 - 0.
Every Sens fan is out in full-force tonight, the city is wild with anticipation. There are big screens set up all over the downtown core, and I am on my way out to go and take part in the mayhem and revelry.
They've really got to win tonight. There's no two ways about it.
In the world of NHL hockey, to let yourself get into a two-game defecit position in a best-of-seven series.... that's just not good.
That's gonna bruise.
So they've got to do it tonight.
There are no options.
I'll be back later with a post-game comment....************
Well, there are different forms of Depression... I am currently in the midst of one of the Sports-Induced type.
Curable only by a radical reversal of fortune in subsequent games!
It is sad. Really a disappointment. Ottawa lost the game by a score of 1 - 0.
So now the Anaheim Ducks lead the series 2 - 0.
That is going to be quite the hole to climb out of, pretty much near impossible, really.
Once again, [my opinion] the Ducks outplayed the Senators, from start to finish. If it were not for the superb play of Ottawa's goaltender, Ray Emery, the score would have been miserable.
An insult.
So much for the foie gras, I guess!
Next game is Saturday, here, on home turf. Or ice, rather.
I still have hope!
**********
The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years till you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating… you finish off as an orgasm.
-- George Carlin –
Have a great Wednesday!
Just stopping by, briefly, to say that I was heartened [← is that even a word?] today to notice something in the Globe and Mail “Book” section.
Bestsellers in the Non-Fiction chart.
#1 and #2… the current bestsellers in this department [in Canada, at least] are Richard Dawkins’s, The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’s, God Is Not Great, respectively.
The Hitchens one is fairly new, but the Dawkins book has been among the top ten for 30 weeks!
Why am I “heartened”?
BECAUSE!
These are the kind of books we should be reading nowadays. I’ve written a wee bit about the The God Delusion, and the Hitchens one is something I intend to get my paws on, soon!
Both of these guys are atheists.
Am I an atheist?
No.
But neither am I a traditional “believer”.
I am some sort of proto-heretic non-atheistic post-religion, hydra-headed hybrid BEAST!
I don’t even KNOW what I am, spiritual-wise. But, I have spent a lot of years as a fundamentalist Christian, and so I know what that is.
Whatever it is that I am now, is better.
I like to call myself a “Christian in exile” to borrow a very apropos phrase from one of my favorite avant-garde authors, John Shelby Spong.
Let me tell you something though, when it comes to some of these atheist writers. [Some, not all… one must be selective]. → They are saying relevant stuff about our existence, stuff that should be read and wrestled with, until our hips are out of joint, like Jacob’s was [Genesis 32:22-28].
People like Sam Harris.
Dawkins.
And now, Hitchens.
Here is a conundrum.
And I admit…. it is only my opinion. After all… I am not “God”.
But I do believe that there is one. A “god” I mean.
It’s just that “it” is not the one we learned about, in Sunday school. The “god” that I believe in is the one that Paul Tillich called “the Ground of All Being.”
Impersonal.
It is the god that defies any religion’s description.
Ineffable.
And… strangely enough, I believe that if this “god” could speak to us, “it” would tell us to read these books, written by the very people who say “it” does not exist, to the exclusion of those books written by those who know all there is to know about “it”.
That is why I am heartened.
Because it seems… it seems to me, according to the Globe and Mail charts, that we are perhaps, finally, and at long last, listening.
And reading.***********
Your own winning literary style must begin with interesting ideas in your head. Find a subject you care about and which in your heart feel others should care about.
It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.-- Kurt Vonnegut --Have a great Tuesday!
GO SENS GO!
Well, I have raced home from work, [even skipping my ritualistic Starbucks time] to go out and watch the senators play Game One of the Stanley Cup finals, against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks.
The above photo is the top line that has to really perform tonight.
Alfredsson, Heatley, and Spezza.
Winning Game One of a Best-of-Seven series is tremendously important [statistically]… and so, I am really hoping that tonight my home team pulls out all the stops and makes fois gras out of these Ducks!
Come on boys, you can do it.
All of Canada [well, except for Leafs fans] is cheering for you!
I will be back later tonight, with my post-game comments…
***********
Post game comments:
Ummm.... that was a heartbreaker.
You know, within the first two minutes Ottawa takes the lead, I'm jumping off the couch, doing a jig... then the Ducks come back with a goal to end the first period in a draw.
Then I ate some lasgagna.
Then Ottawa scores [my beloved Wade Redden... good Saskatchewan boy, and even though he got this goal, it was definitely not his best game ever, he made quite a few defensive-play errors]... so Ottawa is in the lead again.
Third period, Ducks strike again. Now the game is tied at 2.
So I ate some more lasagna, frequently muttering things like "Dammit" and "Hell".
Then [are you listening?] with something like 3 minutes left, Anaheim shovels in another goal and hangs on to win the game 3 - 2.
All in all, I must be fair. The better team won tonight. Ottawa looked rusty after their nine days off the ice. [Since the last series]. Anaheim only had six days off. They came to the arena more prepared, it seemed.
Game 2 is Wednesday.
Now, to sleep. Full of lasagna and anger.
I will surely have nightmares.... probably involving stick-waving Ducks!
***********
Either then or later we kissed, but when it happened it was anticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad. In many ways, it was a good kiss, even a passionate one. But if we were kissing, then we couldn't talk, and the more we talked the more there was to say.-- Nicole Kraus, in From The Desk of Daniel Varsky –Have a great Monday!
I have just started the reading of Theft, a novel by Peter Carey.
It begins thus:
I don’t know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been as famous as a painter could expect to be in his own backyard.
I found it to be an intriguing start.
His wording made me chuckle, but aside from that, I found that I immediately wanted to know about this “stuff” he is alluding to.
The opening lines are such that they make me want to get a grande or venti Starbucks© coffee and entrench myself in some serious reading.
But first, I thought of other impressive first lines of novels. Books I have loved.
So, here is a QUIZ for you.
See if you can recall which books match these openings.
They are all very well-known novels.
At the end, there will be a rating scale, whereupon it shall be arbitrarily decided, based upon your answers, whether you should be allowed to live, or whether someone should pull the plug on you.
FIRST LINES QUIZ:
1) The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon.
2) Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
3) Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
4) It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
5) If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
6) We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone.
7) A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. [Note: If I placed the next line it would make it too easy…]
8) On they went, singing “Eternal Memory,” and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
9) On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor.
10) 1801 -- I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country!
11) The Mole had been working very hard that morning, spring-cleaning his little home.
12) Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
13) Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.
14) In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
15) I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
The ANSWERS can be found HERE.
And now, THE COMPLETELY ARBITRARY RATINGS SCALE:
13 →15 Correct Answers: You are of the upper echelon of The Literati. Your blood temperature is just slightly higher than that of mere mortals. You probably know the correct pronunciation of J.M. Coetzee.
10 →12 Correct Answers: You are still in the upper Literary Savant Status. Your friends often think you are a big know-it-all. Truth is, you are a genius. You know what the “O” in O. Henry stands for.
7 → 9 Correct Answers: You have much more Literary Savvy than the average bear, but your blood temperature is the same as that of mere mortals. You know what kind of birds Flannery O’Connor raised.
5 → 6 Correct Answers: You love reading, but if you opened your travel bag as the stewardess was doing that Seatbelt Routine, and you found that you had forgotten your book, you would NOT make the pilot stop the plane, whereas people in the above three categories would!
3 → 4 Correct Answers: You are a reader, but you prefer to read bestseller type books and classic literature does not interest you much. You think Ian McEwan is the guy who played Gandalf in the movie, Lord of The Rings.
1 → 2 Correct Answers: You are convinced that Dan Brown is the best author that ever lived. You also find it difficult to spell Dan Brown, and are sure that Jane Austen is a female WWF wrestler.
O. Henry is a chocolate bar. And Shakespeare, a brand of fishing rod.
ZERO Correct Answers → You think that Hamlet is something written by Dr. Suess. Once, when asked who Charles Dickens is, you said, “NASCAR-driver?” Tying your shoes is often a problem. The plug should be pulled. ***********
I write quickly -- I can finish a poem in forty-five minutes, sometimes less. Then you go back to make it dance a little better.
Eighty percent of revision is rhythmical – making changes to make the right music.
Eventually, I go to the computer – you can look and see the lines that don’t work. You move furniture.
-- Billy Collins –
Have a great Friday!
This is my 1,000th posting on Bookpuddle!
A thousand blogs!
Holy moly!
You may have noticed lately that the onetime superb quality of my overall bloggitry has sort of waned.
Like, I don’t know… perhaps the last 4 or 5 hundred of them? If you haven’t noticed it, well, I have!
I haven’t been feeling quite as “on the mark” as I would like to be feeling.
Does that ever happen to you?
I’ve been having hmmm…. Blog Undulations!
I’ve been neither reading nor writing nearly as much as I would want!
I’ve been overworked. Overtired. A few personal issues have been really distracting me. All in all, it makes for a poor blogging climate.
Having said this depressing stuff, I have yet one more thing to add.
It is like a combination of Exultant Joy and Concussive Woe.
First, the joyful part is that my home team, the Ottawa Senators, having defeated their nemesis, the Buffalo Sabres, are FINALLY GOING TO THE STANLEY CUP FINALS!
For those of you who may not be savvy to what I am even talking about, the Ottawa Senators are an NHL Hockey team, and umm…. hockey is the only sport in the world! [‘Specially if you’re Canadian, eh?]
And the Stanley Cup, well, that is the Holy Grail of… Hockeydom!
So, my beloved Senators will soon be starting their best-of-seven series against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks.
Now, here is the Concussive Woe part!
I have had tickets to an upcoming Roger Waters concert for about the past five months!
Wouldn’t you know it?
Murphy's Law! → The Senators’ arena [Scotiabank Place] has Game Four booked in as June 4th, at 8 p.m.
Guess when the concert, booked in the same arena, is supposed to start?
Yeah.
June 4th. 8 p.m.
Unless that theory of parallel universes is a reality, these two things AIN'T A'GONNA HAPPEN SIMULTANEOUSLY!
In other words, the hockey game has ousted the concert.
Hockey is all of a sudden more important than The Dark Side of The Moon?
And I was ALREADY having a bad week!
So, I called the ticket place today and demanded an explanation.
Will I get a refund? Will the concert be rescheduled? Should I just kill myself?
The guy on the phone said, “We are not at liberty to discuss the matter quite yet, sir. We are expecting a press release later this afternoon.”
I said, “Yes, but…. the concert is cancelled, am I right?”
“We are not at liberty to discuss…..” he went on, like a robot!
I haven’t been this disappointed since, well, since the Senators lost to Buffalo in last year’s playoffs!
GO SENS GO!
You boys BETTER win that Stanley Cup…. since you’ve now ruined my evening of psychedelic rock n’ roll!************
Have a great Thursday!
I’m convinced that if there is such a thing as reincarnation and I run into the person who was Jane Austen in a past life, I will recognize her instantly by her syntax, delivery, and turn of phrase.
-- Anna Qundlen –
I was just telling my Reading Partner© yesterday that we should read the Jane Austen series together, and [amazingly] she agreed to read all six with me!
Have a great Wednesday!
It is easy to recognise the moment when we have entered the orbit of a snob. Early on in an encounter, the subject of what we "do" will arise and depending on how we answer, we will either be the recipients of bountiful attention or the catalysts of urgent disgust. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them.
-- Alain de Botton, in Status Anxiety –
Have a great Tuesday!
This blog will have nothing to do with books at all.
It is moreso about how, as a child, I was filled with demons!
← And how my dad, [shown here] became my hero.
When I was a kid I had a cat named Joe.
Joe was sleek, black, and a real prowler. Admittedly, he had a few quirks. One was that he loved to eat locusts. And our back yard was infested with locusts. The big grasshoppers that have wings. Some of the more serious ones even make a big clacking sound as they fly erratically all over the place.
Hah! That colossal racket gives them away bigtime!
Joe would bat them right out of the air and eat them, legs hanging out of his mouth. I was always astounded, and somewhat disgusted at this. But I loved him, despite his eating habits and bad breath!
His other quirk [also related to ingestion, I guess] was that, at times, he thought I was his mom.
I won’t tell you how I…. [ahem]… knew this!
Suffice it to say, I started to wear shirts around Joe, more often!
But now here are the demonic parts of the story.
Joe, as do all cats, loved to sleep. God, he could sleep good.
All curled up and toasty, say for instance, on the couch.
But I had the devil in me, I did. [I have since been properly exorcised!]
I cannot tell you how many times I crept up to Joe, so peacefully dreaming of mountainsides filled with low-flying locusts… and I would put a deck of playing cards right up to his ever-sensitive bionic cat-ear…. an ear that could hear, in that moment, a mouse blinking, across the room. Then….. RIIIIIIIIIIP… I would rifle through the cards with a horrendous snap!
54 gunshots [including Jokers] into his poor comatose brain! Joe would leap to the ceiling, and I would laugh.
Ha – ha – ha – ha – ha!
[Because I had the devil in me!]
And I also had a drumset.
Joe loved to sleep right in the bass drum, because I had a pillow in there, to muffle the sound.
Again, visions of locusts, yadda, yadda… fields of catnip, the whole nine yards…
[Do you know where I’m going with this?]
Yeah.
Because I was full of Satan, I would creep…. creep…. creep…. to my trusty drumstool.
Sit down. Even wait a bit, savoring the moment, shoulders heaving.
Then, with all of my weight, along with some I never even had, I would trounce upon that bass-drum pedal. Sweet LORD!
Joe would launch twenty feet across the room without once touching rug!
I so loved that cat!
We had him for hmmm… well over a decade?
Then, one day he was gone.
And it wasn’t LIKE Joe to be gone, ever!
Things got bad. Our back yard was becoming really locust-infested in his absence!
Clackity-clackity-clackity-clackity….
We finally had the sense to phone the local Pound, and ask them if they had perhaps picked up a black cat near our address.
[I can still see my dad nodding with the phone at his ear…. listening…] They had!
They knew Joe.
But….. [grab a box of Kleenex]… because he was never claimed in time, Joe had already been euthanized.
My dad then found out that the reason Joe was nabbed in the first place was because our neighbors had TRAPPED HIM in an actual CAT TRAP, in their yard.
I will never forget what happened next, as long as I live.
My dad marched outside [I ran after him… hence you are getting an eyewitness account here]… and I listened as my dad tore a nice Saskatchewan-sized rectangular strip off our neighbor, Mr. Kreutz!
Oh God, I loved it.
I loved hearing my dad consign this guy to the future torments of hell. There were threats given, from both sides of the fence, but my dad’s ones were way better.
In the fracas, my dad even brought up the issue of how Mr. Kreutz had once changed the oil in his car and spilled the old stuff out so close to our fence that it had leaked into our garden soil. [Personally, I thought this was reason enough to kill the guy right then and there. You’ve gotta remember, I had demons.]
But my dad did not kill anyone that day. When he said all that needed to be said he turned and walked back to where I was. Hiding behind something.
Where I had been listening, and shaking, in a mixture of sadness and worship.
Sadness, because Joe could not be replaced.
Worship, because my dad could never be, either.
Let me say it ahead of time… a good month before Father’s Day.
I miss you, dad!
For more about him, click HERE!************
"The target is faith, really, the willingness of people to believe something without reason or without evidence. And not just anything, either, but the most important things. In other words, they claim to have the authority of the divine to tell people what to eat, what to read, how to have sex. They don't just say God exists, something that not even the most brilliant theologian has ever been able to demonstrate, but that they know his mind. They know what he wants me to have for lunch, or not, or, what book to have on the shelf, or with whom to go to bed. It's preposterous. "
-- Christopher Hitchens, in a Powells interview on the focus of his book God is Not Great –
Have a great Monday!
I’m having a moral dilemma.
I am not willing to buy all of the books I want to read.
And sometimes these are too new to borrow from the Library.
So, since I spend so much time in the bookstore anyway, I have at times read entire books in there, without purchasing them.
It’s because of people like me that one day we will have books behind glass, in stores.
Or…. wrapped in cellophane!
Or… [horrors!] → Book vending machines!
My current dilemma is as follows.
See, I often receive review-books direct from the publisher.
In exchange for reviewing them, I get the books for free.
In my most recent shipment I was anticipating a certain book in the package.
However, while there were some amazingly lovely books in there, the anticipated one was absent!
In the meantime, I had bought a new copy of the thing and had sent it in the mail to my Reading Partner.
Now she will receive her copy, and [chances are] I will not have received mine!
However, I have no intention of buying a second copy.
Despite the rumors, I am NOT rich, as are my esteemed readers of Bookpuddle here.
No.
I am a Bookpauper!
And the book is too new to be retrieving it from a Library. I would be on a waiting list ten miles long!
So.
Enter my dilemma.©
Is it wrong for me to make successive trips to the bookstore [I am writing this very blog while sitting at the bookstore] and in periodic installments, read the entire book here, without purchasing a second copy for myself?
What would Jesus do?
And another thing.
Is there an actual word for this proposed action?
Like… is is stealing? Isn’t that a bit harsh?
Pilfering? Poaching? Purloining?
See, “purloining” still implies that the item will be kept by the… purloiner. And I have no intention of stealing [per se] or purloining, as it were.
Neither am I “borrowing”, technically.
Pirating? But, doesn’t “pirating” involve copying? Intentions of resale?
What is it? Is it “filching”? “Looting”? “Robbery”?
How does it differ from say, eating a head of lettuce while you are still in the supermarket?
Or… taking a new car for a test-drive to go GET your groceries?
Really now! What is the word for this clandestine activity of mine?
Must I invent one, seeing as I [currently] have every intention of doing the thing?
How about “Borroining”? As in, a cross between borrowing and outright purloinitry?
“Infilchating”?
“Piration”?
“Rob-reading”?
“Templooting”?
“Shopreading”?
“Page-pilfing"?
Any ideas? Any moral instruction for me?************
Having just finished Peter Carey’s latest novel, Theft, I have mixed feelings.
