I have just returned from the used bookstore! While I wasn't able to find a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises or a sturdy old edition of Albert Camus's The Plague for my dad, I did leave with a few worthy (I hope) titles. Per Jax's recommendation (apparently The White Bone, featured in the latest Scary-Crayon book review, put her in mind of it), I snagged a copy of Richard Adams's Watership Down, as well as its sequel, Tales From Watership Down, by the same author. In addition to these, Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen and The Stranger by Albert Camus comprised the fiction that I bought during today's visit. Add to these a collection of critical essays on Kafka and his work, a book on learning basic to intermediate German, and a German-English dictionary, and the list of today's print purchases is complete. As the latter two purchases may suggest, I plan to teach myself a bit of German. Rah.

I also started reading Achilles by Elizabeth Cook yesterday -- good stuff so far. Way better than Troy. I should finish it on Monday, at which point I'll either start in on The Stranger or Andre Gide's The Immoralist. Haven't decided yet.

Off to watch more "Street Fighter II: V" episodes and then do a bit of drawing and writing for these books o' mine. Ja ne.

The Scary-Crayon review of The White Bone is finally online! Granted, I sacrificed sleep to get it done -- not that I could've slept anyway, as fucking hot as it is in here -- but I came through. Go me. It's a fairly lengthy review, but I think it's pretty good. Anyway, enjoy! And do comment.

I've been having ideas for books to write like crazy this week. Will I get any writing done this weekend? We shall see!

I think I'll take the GRE this summer. Still probably won't apply to grad school in December, though -- with the exception of creative writing, there's not really a subject I'm interested in studying in-depth right now (in an academic setting, anyway; I do enjoy philosophy, frex, but I've grown weary of academic pretension, even though I'm fairly good at affecting it). Maybe that'll change in the coming years (assuming I'm around for them, which seems highly unlikely), but in the meantime at least a good score on the GRE would bolster my self-esteem in the company of these hot-shot academic achievers. At least then I'll have something with which to nurse my intellectual pride when those people shun me for the company of "smarter" and more well-to-do individuals!

And now, a list of books/literature I've read in the past month and a half:

No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner
In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Marco's Millions by William Sleator
The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

I started reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe this morning. It's not bad so far! And hopefully I'll have a review of The White Bone up on Scary-Crayon either tonight or tomorrow night. Anyway, ja!