Happy holidays, my fellow book-readers! Hopefully your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Yule/[insert weird holiday that I have never heard about but feel the need to include so as not to offend you, ya weirdo] was everything you hoped it to be and more. As for me, I have received a plethora of new books, which I am very grateful for, as Carrie has been completed and I had been rereading old Series Of Unfortunate Events books out of sheer desperation. I got Tender is the Night, a Fitzgerald book which I had meaning to get to. Also on the list was Broadway Nights, an autobiography disguised as a work of fiction written by Seth Rudetsky, the DJ of Sirius XM "On Broadway", the all-showtunes station on satellite radio. I got The Importance of Being Earnest, which is an old classic but undeniably hilarious, and also the entire book of Batboy, which is one of my favorite Broadway flops based on that creepy picture of that kid with the huge bug eyes and giant, fanged mouth out of Weekly World News. It's obvious why this show failed, right?
Last, but definitely not least, I received a brand new Kindle. Now, don't get me wrong, I have always been somewhat against Kindles. I relished the idea of reading and rereading a book until it has been ripped, dog-eared and tattered out of sheer love. That was how reading was supposed to be. But since this new piece of technology had been foisted upon me, I decided that the least I could do was give it a chance. I bought a few books on it (Bossypants by Tina Fey, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, those kinds of light entertainment that are just long enough to make you feel smart for finishing them even though they were full of penis jokes) and settled down for the plane ride to Santa Fe which I was taking that same day. Giving it a chance was a mistake. I was basically glued to that contraption for the entire week we spent in New Mexico. It was so handy! I finished two whole books on that thing, something I have never before done in the course of a mere seven days. There was no risk of reading a page, only to discover that you had just read that exact same page the last time you put the book down. If your D.H Lawrence became too heavy for you, all you had to do was press the little house button and select your favorite piece of teen romance trash for a quick brain-cleanser. Kindles are conniving evil geniuses, bent on brainwashing the human race into throwing away all their well-loved paperbacks in substitute for a cold, heartless piece of machinery and oh my God I love my Kindle so much.
And so, all biases aside, I really do like having a Kindle. I started rereading Lolita three days ago and I'm already 64% through it! (I know this because it says so at the bottom of the page, not because I'm some crazy mathematician who calculates the percentage at which she reads things. That would be weird.) Oh, and for all you people who have read my Lolita-based blog posts, rereading Lolita is a really good idea. I missed so many important parts, along with unimportant parts that were equally beautiful. Humbert's obsession with Lo is rooted all the way back to his childhood, where he had a little love affair with a girl named Annabel who he tried to have sex with a couple of times, but was always caught by either Annabel's parents or some ribald-talking sailors. The girl died shortly after they departed from some disease which I can't remember. So in a way, Lo is a little recreation of his Annabel, made to numb the grief of an untimely death. I can't believe I missed that the first time. I mean, I read it, of course, but I didn't actually absorb it. Oops.
Anyways, I know that this blog post isn't necessarily based on one certain book, but it does go into the details of several, so I figured it would be a suitable entry for a day when I wasn't even supposed to write a blog post in the first place. Whatever. I just wanted to rant about books and such. Enjoy the rest of your break, O reader, My reader! (O reader, My reader is a phrase used by Humbert Humbert several times in the book, and I found it sort of old-timey and romantic, even though in this context it's sort of uncalled for.)
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