World of Leaves

Enjoying literature is not an easy thing to do. At least not if you try to lead a normal life, that is, whatever that is. Because there is so much of it around. Nothing but letters in endless combinations. Sometimes I wonder if I would go mad or start a philosophical or armed war in Borges's Library of Babel, engage in bare-knuckle-fights, bludgeon the skulls and smash the brains of fellow searchers with uncreased spines of books that have never been opened. Would I take a pencil with me and scribble in the margins, multiplying the already infinite number of possible texts further or would I stab my own eyes and pierce my tongue and throat with it to free myself from the curse of written and spoken language? I would have to pierce my eardrum as well as my own brains, too, writing my last unreadable message with lines of dripping blood.

Having just finished Cosmopolis, I am confronted with choices that I can hardly grasp. Every step from now can lead me in the wrong direction. What should I read next? Should I go back to DeLillo's beginnings and read him in chronological order or rather go directly to Underworld? What about Pynchon? Gravity's Rainbow or start with V.? What about the still not finished Barthelme and Barth? Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, because DFW mentioned it in some interview? And DFW himself. Besides Infinite Jest and The Pale King and some of his journalism, I haven't read anything else. What about rereading Infinite Jest? And Don Quixote, the new 70,- € German translation is still waiting for me, as well as Bolano's 2666 and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Auster after The New York Trilogy, another round of House of Leaves, Catcher in The Rye or turn to Franny & Zooey and Salinger's other writings? Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is waiting on my bookshelf for the last 6 years or so. Maybe 8. I was a totally different being back then (well, not so radically different as I wished I would be.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or some more Vonnegut or Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, what about Proust and Nabokov and every single Sherlock Holmes story? William Gibson, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, Zadie Smith and Flannery O'Connor. Toni Morrison. I could go on for days, literally, and weeks, losing much of the precious time I would otherwise spend reading some of that (or other) novels. One thing at least seems to be pretty clear to me: After finishing Franzen's self-indulging The Discomfort Zone, he will be off my reading list for a long, long time.