how it ended

I’m half way through Jay McInerney’s collection of short stories How it Ended.

The first four stories has me doing a double-take every time I remember that McInerney is the author and not some bright, young and hopeful writer just on the rise. He reads like David Sedaris but less funny, less cynical and more preoccupied with sex and drugs*. The short story Smoke reads McInerney only because I’ve read it before as part of his novel Brightness Falls. Getting in Touch with Lonnie is vaguely familiar but I don’t remember where I read it first. I have three more shorts to go through and for some reason I am reminded of T.C. Boyle’s After the Plague which I never finished reading. It sits atop my bookcase with another book by the same author I have yet to plow through.

I have another week until Promo Boards and enrolment but I really don’t want to go home to the province yet. Food, family and TV do not match the enticement of reading (or at least trying to read) one book a day. I tried making a list of the books I’ve read this year and the number does not even come up to half of the amount I usually read in a year. I am a painfully slow reader, what a friend reads in a day I read in a week. The number of books I do devour in a year is still not to be ashamed of.

I don’t know. I’m just feeling really, really lazy today. All I want to do (as usual) is have my nth cup of coffee, listen to music and read**.


* Right now I wish I hadn’t given away my copy of David Sedaris’ Barrel Fever. I really didn’t care much for his writing there but I would love to read it again just to compare.
** I remember something I wrote years ago about how my life can “distilled” into cups of coffee, sleepless nights, books read and rain. Well, fours years down the road nothing much has changed. Everything’s still the same.