I took my kids to the book store today and let them run like heathen.
They had fun. I usually take them separately (and usually they go to the library), but their mother is at work and we needed to get out of the house.
My daughter picked out a few books for her little brother (and then read them to him, sort of).
She also picked out a book of antique paper dolls (Dolly Dingle) and an Anne of Green Gables pop up cottage book to let the dolls live in.
Here’s what I picked out, maybe more for me than them:
A beautiful illustrated Durer biography that’s written more or less like a comic book, and an illustrated edition of Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.”
Certain novels not only cry out for what we call “critical interpretations” but actually try to help direct them . . . Books I tend to associate with this INTERPRET-ME phenomenon include stuff like Candide, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’s The Stranger. These five are works of genius of a particular kind: they shout their genius. Mr. Markson, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, tends rather to whisper, but his w.o.g.’s no less successful . . . Clearly the book was/is in some way “about” Wittgenstein, given the title. This is one of the ways an INTERPRET-ME fiction clues the critical reader in about what the book’s to be seen as on a tertiary level “about”: the title: Ulysses’s title, its structure as Odyssean/Telemachean map (succeeds); Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem (really terrible); Cortázar’s Hopscotch (succeeds exactly to the extent that one ignores the invitation to hop around in it); Burroughs’s Queer and Junkie (fail successfully (?)).
From David Foster Wallace’s essay “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” which is collected in Both Flesh and Not.
Biblioklept 