Killing Me Softly With His Blog

I faced another obstacle this week in John's "The Great Wednesday Compare". I've never read a Kurt Vonnegut novel. No excuses. My first husband, Manfred, Sr., had them laying all over the house. My high school/college girlfriend, (who I'll refer to as The Sneerer) loved them and was fully conscious that she was hot shit for being able to discuss every single novel in detail. Getting back to Manfred, Sr., he even belonged to/helped found a science-fiction club at the University Of Oklahoma called "The Kilgore Trout Society" back in the late 1970s.

With all these horrendous Swiss-cheesy gaps in my reading, can I really call myself a true bookworm? Am I just a pretender to the shelves? I was thinking I'd just go ahead and make a clean breast of it and confess to some other books I haven't tackled, but Kurt is probably a big enough shocker for one entry. Maybe next time.

Today was the day Manfred, Jr. boarded the plane to return to the United States. How nice of the Koreans to locate the airport (a damn good one, BTW) in Incheon, which is near Seoul! After an affectionate parting with my spawn, I caught the bus back to Seoul Station, then took the subway over to Itaewon and hightailed it into What The Book?

A couple of blissful hours later, I stumbled out again with Slaughterhouse-Five and uh......nine other books. Sad but true-- I was running through What The Book? like a pig through the corn. But it's OK. It's not my fault. It's John's fault:

Slaughterhouse Five -Kurt Vonnegut
Fall On Your Knees -Ann-Marie MacDonald
Murther And Walking Spirits -Robertson Davies
Fifth Business -Robertson Davies [OK, I think the Canadians are well-represented]
Summer Of '49 -David Halberstam [I'm sorry Halberstam died. I always meant to read his baseball book]
Terrorist -John Updike [Good score. Found a used copy for about 5 dollars.]
American Pastoral -Philip Roth [I guess I'll see how far I can get on my Pulitzer-winning novels list this year.]
Living Reed -Pearl S. Buck [novel about Korea]
Hunger -Knut Hamsun [I vowed that if I saw this again, I'd grab it and stick it on the re-read shelf. Hunger is a novel that's 117 years old, but the writing is so fresh, not to mention kick-ass that it wears its age lightly. With an introduction by Paul Auster.]
Darkly Dreaming Dexter -Jeff Lindsay [Not really my type of thing, but I've heard so many good things about the new show based on these novels. There's a great picture of Michael C. Hall on the cover. It's so difficult to think of David Fisher from Six Feet Under as a serial killer!]

What The Book? has a bulletin board just outside the store, and someone stuck up a notice that he/she wants to start a book club, so I intend to respond. I just won't be satisfied until I've got the book subculture re: expats off the ground in this country!