If there is one thing that I love it is organization, and the more anal and digital it is, the more I love it. Bring on Library Thing. It’s the perfect web based application for anyone with a decent book collection. I have been entering ISBN’s for a couple of days now and I am about one-fifth of the way through cataloguing my collection. Going through my books is such a trip down Memory Ln. of the phases of my life. The naive bohemian Kerouac days, the dirty Henry Miller days, the pomo days, the completist phase… And the realization that I have several copies of many of the same titles. I know that I used to buy books in paperback that I already owned in hardcover as to not fuck up the spine of the cloth cover. I have many first editions that I kept in pristine condition, until my roommates tried to put the xmas tree in the fire a few years ago and burned down the living room and charred the spines of most of my collection.

You can see my collection here. Library thing is free for up to 200 books, an unlimited membership costs $10/year or $25/lifetime, a small price to pay for an OCD outlet. You can also make a cool little widget that shows random books from your collection like I have down there in my sidebar. And it’s all linked up through Amazon Associates so click and buy some of the books in my collection because I need money.

I finished reading Consider The Lobster by David Foster Wallace. It was the first book that I have read cover to cover that had nothing to do with architecture¹ in quite some time. CTL is a collection of essays dating back to the mid-1990’s up until present day(ish) 2005. I have always preferred Wallace’s nonfiction to his fiction.² He seems to have a gift for presenting subjects as wide-ranging as Adult Video Awards and a review of a five volume Dostosevsky biography in an interesting manner. He can sound both SNOOTily³ academic and pornographically dirty 20 pp. earlier w/r/t the Adult Video Essay. Highlights include “Big Red Son”⁴; “Up, Simba”⁵; and the title essay “Consider the Lobster”⁶. I would recommend that you read all of the essays because it is great to see a writer such as DFW handle subjects from the aforementioned to 9/11⁷, tearing apart sports biographies as cliche after cliche and the trouble of showing people the humor in Kafka. As usual the insane amount of footnotes⁸ and “w/r/t”’s⁹ get a little tiresome and frustrating, but when you have finished it seems like they were kinda fun. If you liked A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and have tried more than once to read the eighteen pound Infinite Jest you will enjoy this.¹¹

¹Not including physics textbooks and financial mgt. books.
²Though to be fair, I have never made it more than 1/3 through Infinite Jest
³Read the essay about the seedy underbelly of American Lexicography.^1
4The porn one in which DFW writes the words “anal” and “DP” multiple times.
⁵About Sen. John McCain.
⁶An essay for Gourmet Magazine* asking if Lobsters feel pain and painting a pretty convincing picture of lobsters grabbing (clawing?) for the edge of the pot and knocking on the lid trying to escape the boiling water.
⁷September 11, 2001.
⁸See? Kinda tiresome.
⁹With regard to.
¹⁰His previous essay collection.
¹¹I suppose.

*I think.