Monday Books

At lunch today, I skipped out of the office, as I sometimes do, and headed for the Borders at 19^th and L, a noisy port of printed words and information-hungry Washingtonians with a stony façade along one wall that always seems an odd mix with the rather bland downtown D.C. buildings that surround it. I had finished a novel last night, a rather smart one at that, and I needed something new to occupy my time. Now, unlike Joanna, I’m not really a new fiction reader. Last year, I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Clever, Gimmicky Novel About Autism, and wasn’t all that impressed. During my time as a misanthropic youth, I kept up with Chuck Palahniuk’s work, but I quit after Diary, a novel to which Laura Miller was perhaps too kind when she said that it “traffics in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine Inch Nails.”

No, despite a few forays into the world of recent fiction, I mostly stick to books I like to think of as Stuff I Should’ve Read Already. Despite having graduated with a degree in English (albeit with an emphasis on modern drama), I didn’t read any Roth, Bellow, or Updike—just to name a few notable absences—in school. And not having taken any philosophy or economics classes, I missed out on too many of the rather obvious books that make the classic cases for much of what spend my days defending. These days I tend to spend my reading hours playing catch up.

But sometimes I’m just a sucker for a book review—especially one in the New York Times—and that’s what happened today. It’s a dangerous thing to finish a novel without having any idea of what you’ll read next, but that’s exactly what I did. Thus, I found myself strolling away from 19^th and L with a copy of the newest debut novel written by a buzzworthy New York whiz kid: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. How could I resist a novel about a cinema-loving outsider with a quirky professor father? Yes, Marisha’s jacket photo is rather fetching, but so is her prose. Only twenty pages in, I’ve already felt that delirious surge that comes with reading particularly grand sentences, those radiant collections of words that seem, somehow, to not only transmit energy, but actively create it, strutting showoffishly past the wowed face of thermodynamics. Let’s face it, this girl’s hot in all sorts of ways.