Friday, July 4, 2008

a lullaby of sorts

there's definitely more to come in future blog posts a la moi about a book i just finished reading titled Your Secrets Sleep With Me by Darren O'Donnell, a performance artist. A genuine find from the bottom shelf in the back of an Indigo because i judged it by its cover. This book made my summer. It not only takes place in Toronto, but has to deal with a world that is destroying itself with the CN Tower collapsing into the lake, massacres on the Gardiner, and most of all a strange sense of perversion that would always catch me off guard and proceed to make me slightly uncomfortable (which also always seemed to happen whenever I was reading it on the subway) yet it is above all, a contemplative piece of mastery.

For now, I'm just going to write out an exerpt. But later I will tell you so much more.

Page 112:

The City Holds
the sense that everybody could be doing significantly better.
There is talent, determination, lots of good ideas, but, for some reason, something is interfering with the city's ability to make a leap forward. Some say it's simply a lack of cold hard cash.
However, while there may not be the monetary resources to move the thing forward, there is enough dough to keep the population intertwined with circuits of energy that has been there for years and years.
The City is like a teenager who can't have access to the car until it does its chores. And there is always another chore.
Is the future as much of what is as the past?


P.S.: back to me now.
Here's a review of the book. Shoutout to the writer's connection to Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, because that was also a book that made my summer, but first. I don't know why, but I've been on a weird train of reading books with strange pre-pubescent protagonists. First EL&IC, then Running With Scissors, and now this. What's next? I was hoping to read This Is Your Brain On Music, but I don't think that has many kids in it. Too bad.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting information, I love your blog Jess, definitely gonna keep a close eye on it,

Vojdan