Recumbant

Going back to work last week, I continued with The Friar and The Cipher, a sort of middlebrow intellectual history concerning nascent enlightenment from Athens through the Magna Carta and ultimately Roger Bacon and Doctor Dee. The argument was entertaining though far from persuasive.

Mymania became apparent late in the week when I read notice of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, which I must have been rather oblivious to at the time of its publication. The usual pathology gripped me as the stress from work sublimated itself into a bodily need to possess and hold this nine hundred page novel of Mumbai, regardless if I imagined myself full for a decade after reading Maximum City.Thankfully a whisper of reason offered a palpable alternative: The Royal Family by W.T. Vollmann.

I have now read 250 pages of this frankly antithetical novel, one which hammers at all notions of rehabilitation. I will likely spend the rest of the weekend, today, with this imperial stance on the wayward and overlooked. The last part of which I coined from Scott Esposito.

I also discovered another YA author and novel the other day, courtesy of bookslut: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson.