in between re-establishing my social life, i’m trying to squeeze in as many novels as i can before the last lap of pre-As mugging begin (MOTHEROF-).

1.

finished Amélie Nothomb’s Hygiene and the Assassin. smart, clean, and Pretextat Tach is convincingly a genius. i don’t know if it’s metafiction, but while reading i’m consciously evaluating the book with the author’s own literary criticism. it’s as if instead of focussing on the plot i’m just constantly catching bits of revelation Nothomb’s plating out. it’s just smart, really smart. reminds me of Wilde’s Importance earlier in the book with all it’s epigrams referring to literature and culture (in fact it does allude to Oscar Wilde about midway through. i love how texts influence each other). it degenerates slightly towards the end though. when pretextat flounders it becomes less enjoyable for me, and it drifts into a kind of surrealism which is pretty unlike the practical preciseness pretextat displays formally. STILL, worth the read. in fact, i’ll say please go read it asap.

2.

halfway through Milan Kundera’s Identity. it’s romance with heavy focus on self and self’s ship with another, without the chicklit-drama nor the subplot, which i don’t like because i’m shallow and bored. so i’ve decided to drop it and move on to something more productive such as math – yeah right. such as reading Skippy Dies. which is slightly lengthier than i can afford now, so we’ll see. so far i only like the parts about Howard the Coward and the fat math geek. i don’t get Skippy and his constant drugged out state, because i am a conservative virginal as- yea you get the idea.

3.

speaking of Kundera and inter-textuality, it occurred to me that Everything is Illuminated was probably inspired by The Unbearable Lightness of Being. alright i may be wrong, but the exact phrase – everything is illuminated – appears in Lightness, and the overall style of Illuminated is reminiscent of it.. right? ok maybe i’m just reading too much into it. LOL. READING. HAHA, HAHA, HAHA. ->PUN<-

4.

fat math geek from Skippy Dies and the Big Bang Theory and also Doctor Who makes me wish i were born extremely science&math-oriented. if i could rock physics i’ll wear thinkgeek shirts exclusively and plaster my room with accurate DayGlo replicates of constellations and have all sorts of sciency gadgets. and i’ll watch bad sci-fi movies without cringing and take apart my graphic calculator.

the nearest i got to being a geek was in secondary two at the peak of my internet usage, where i double-encrypted some strange message with strange computer code that even today i cannot fully figure out how to decode. which now that i think of it was just a cruel time warp so my younger self could serve as a tool to underscore the loserness of my current self.

but seriously, if i could choose i’d want to be a geek. and do all sorts of geeky wonderful stuff and i want to hang out in comic book stores (and also get pissed off when people call it comic books, cuz they’re graphic novels). unfortunately i’m much more adept at analysing personalities off the Great Gatsby than understand a fraction of string theory. :-( THIS LIFE IS NOT MINE TO CHOOSE.

wow, to be a physicist..