THE SLATE DIARIES

The Slate Diaries is a collection of weeklong diaries kept by people from Beck to Bill Gates. This book has been on my want-to-read list for at least two years, but it wasn’t available at any of the five library systems (yes, I’m a junkie) I had access to in Minnesota. I’m a voyeur, and I wish more people I know would keep diaries and let me read them, but I can be satisfied by the diaries of strangers. Here is a good excerpt from the diary of Jim Holt, a magazine editor:

There are two marine creatures that I have always identified with. One of them is the juvenile sea squirt. This is a little thing that wanders through the sea looking for a nice rock or hunk of coral to make its home for life. When it finds the right spot and takes root, it no longer has any use for its brain. So it eats it. In much the same way, I have been wandering through Manhattan these 20 years in search of a suitable hunk of coral to attach myself to. A month ago I found it. It is a magazine called the New Leader. Finally, I can eat my brain.

I think we all know how that feels.

I’ve started and abandoned many diaries, myself. I have trouble maintaining them because I begin to get anxious that they’re dull as dirt. Even if they’re meant for my eyes only, I can’t stop thinking about an historian unearthing them someday, getting all excited at first, and then tossing them aside after a few entries, sighing, “What a bore.” I always end up recording (sometimes superficial) sights and events and never seem to have the time, ambition, or material for the witty diatribes, clever intellectual analysis, and lyrical emotional examinations I plan out during idle moments in the shower or sitting in traffic. But then I read this passage from David Sedaris’s Slate diary with recognition (for my pretentious adolescent journals) and relief (for my current mundane missives):

I’d like to know what I ate when I was 19 years old. How much did it cost for a pound of chicken or a pack of cigarettes? What did I carry in my wallet, and who did I talk to on the telephone? My earliest diaries tell me none of these things. They tell me not who I was, but who I wanted to be. That person wore a beret and longed to ride a tandem bicycle with Laura Nyro.

THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS

I'm enjoying some light fare, The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde. It's the third book in a series about a detective named Thursday Next who lives in a parallel universe where the Crimean War never ended and dodos are popular pets and literature is incredibly important. Next and different fictional characters jump between the real world and various books to solve mysteries. Sometimes the writing can be gimmicky and the stories chaotic, but the literary jokes are worth it. Take this, for example, when Next visits an unfinished fantasy novel (all setting, no characters or plot) that has become a sanctuary for fictional animals:

“There seem to be an awful lot of rabbits,” I observed, looking around.
“Ah, yes,” replied Perkins . . . “we never did get the lid on reproduction within Watership Down—if left to their own devices, the book would be so full of dandelion-munching lagomorphs that every other word would be rabbit within a year. Still, Lennie enjoys it here when he has some time off.”

But then, I love, love, love cheap Of Mice and Men jokes.