reading

I finally finished reading Beautiful Children the night before last, curled up in bed with my flashlight hoping that all the rattles and whistles and coos I was hearing were just the windows and radiators and pigeons, not the ghosts that people in town love to tell us haunt this place.

Like everything is for me lately, the book was hard to get into, in part because of sentences like these: "The next morning, water boiled. Hormone-free, ranch-raised chicken embryos scrambled over a medium flame." Clever you, Charles Bock, and irritated me. But I ended up very happy to have read it.

Now I'm reading The Feast of Love, mostly because Charles Baxter is speaking at the Sexposium that concludes our month-long residency here in Trinidad. If all goes as it usually does, I'll labor terribly getting into it, take forever reading it, and end up liking it, hopefully all before Charles Baxter arrives in town.