October was a messy month and I’m thinking that all the months from now on may be messy (although not every month will have a hurricane pointed right at me). At the start of October I convinced myself that there were no more books to suggest. In some ways this might be very true: it’s often leaked into my gray cells that I should just recommend reading Ulysses once a month and ignore all the other entertainments.
But that would immediately reduce the regular visitors to this website to just one or two. Even I seldom reread Ulysses more that two times in any given year and even the suggestion of once a month has me climbing my bookshelves for that new edition of Proust I bought a few years ago.
I sit here in my library/office/sunroom at a built-in desk with a large screen tracking news or showing movies and a smaller screen displaying my current reading and an even smaller screen flashing notifications and announcements. But then on the wall on ether side of my desk there are hundreds of real ink and paper books I want to read but my aging eyes balk at.
One night after I’d turned off my reading light but not yet sunk into sleep, an uneasy feeling swept up my back. I was accustomed to the sweep of shadows along the walls as the train emptied its passengers and they marched by my windows and cars braked at the corner stoplight, but one shadow had stopped, its source blocking the stripe of light at the corner of my closest window.