Kilgore Trout and Dog Shit. Also: Need More Books.

I had a disappointing experience yesterday. I started to read The Loop by Nicholas Evans, which seemed like it might be an interesting book, all about wolves and what not. I remembered liking The Horse Whisperer.

Then I remembered, I read The Horse Whisperer when I was 14.

Because that's exactly what his books read like: romance novels for 14 year old girls. He and John Irving should have a slumber party together (I want the hours I spent reading Widow for One Year back, dammit!).

Which brings me to the current dilemma. Both Ryan and I spent a good portion of time over the last few days, standing in front of our bookshelf, frowning. We've either read (or reread) all the books on our bookshelf or they're a text book from college that one of us couldn't bear to part with. This was how I came to pick up The Loop, as I had been given it years ago and never bothered to read it. It made it all the way across the country, I thought I might as well read it and it seemed as if there was nothing else.

When this happened in Palo Alto, I would just go and peruse my parents library as my father for years has made a frequent habit of picking up books at libraries from the free pile and driving my mother nuts.

So the current dilemma. Need more books. I spent some time yesterday looking at what Google has to offer and there are some good ones but the tactile pleasure of curling up in bed, holding the book and turning the pages is lost when you are staring at a laptop screen. Libraries are terrible for me: I always forget to return the book.

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Speaking of books, I reread Breakfast of Champions the other day. I also took the dog to the dog park. I thought about a story that Kilgore Trout might write. The story is about an alien who comes to earth and ends up arriving in a dog park. The people on the planet he comes from don't keep other organisms as pets, so he doesn't understand what the dog park is. He assumes that the dogs are some kind of livestock and the people are harvesting the shit, and saving them in plastic bags to preserve them.

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