"Aboard the gliding craft, a stewardess crawled down the aisle, over bodies and debris, telling people in each row to remove their shoes, remove sharp objects from their pockets, assume a fetal position. At the other end of the plane, someone was wrestling with a flotation device. Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn’t this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn’t think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. “Crash landing, crash landing.” They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact. They patted themselves for ballpoint pens, went fetal in their seats." - Don DeLillo, White Noise

32 books for my 32nd year

I'll be be turning 32 on Sunday.

Reading is something I love but am incredible lazy at. As a way to motivate slash intimidate myself to read more, I drew up a list of 32 books to read before I turn 33.

This list includes stuff I've had on the shelves for years, classics I've never read, things I've heard are good, highlights from Donald Barthleme's syllabus, books that just looked interesting when researching on Amazon.

It's all fiction. That's where I want to focus.

These are in no particular order, but updated with an order as soon as I finish them. The list is likely to change per my whim, and I'm very whimmy. Crossed out things mean I've finished them, blue ones mean I'm currently reading. (List started Nov 7, updated Nov 26)

1. Amelia Gray - Museum of the Weird
2. Linsay Hunter - Daddy's
3. William Gass - Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
4. Leonard Michaels - Complete Stories
5. Georges Perec - Life A User's Manual
6. Thomas Pynchon - V
7. Don DeLillo - White Noise
8. William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
9. Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom
   
10. Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions
11. Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
12. William Gass - Omensetter's Luck
13. Mary Robison - Tell Me
14. Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg Ohio
15. Donald Barthleme - 60 Stories
16. John Hawkes - The Lime Twig
17. Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
18. Nicole Kraus - Great House
19. Borges - Labyrinths
20. Franz Kafka - The Castle
21. Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
22. Isaac Bashevis Singer - Gimpel the Fool
23. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
24. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn
25. Brian Evenson - Fugue State
26. Christine Schutt - Nightwork
27. Barry Hannah - High Lonesome
28. Barry Hannah - Bats Out of Hell
29. Richard Yates - The Easter Parade
30. Salvador Plascencia - The People of Paper
31. Stanley Crawford - Gascoyne
32. David Ohle - Motorman

Willie Master's Lonesome Wife

Most people are distressed, honestly enough, by their own dirt. Imagine the shit of a lifetime packed into tubs. It would be of comfort knowing it was yours. Still, the dirt of others is even more distressing. Pick another's nose, for instance. Proof enough? Well, that's my theory. We get used to it—our own—we get used to it. Soldiers get used to it. They get used to death, distress, and the dirt of others. Mothers, of course, get used to it. We whores get used to it. But all of us are harlots in ourselves, and soldiers: we get used to it—our dead breath and dying eyelight, bare basins and odd bodies—used to living in a trench. - William Gass, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (part of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year "challenge.")

unpreparing

I tell my boyfriend the news and his eyes light up. What if, he says, what if someone kidnapped the baby? For ransom, or to sell it on the black market? What if you tripped and fell and landed on your stomach?

I don't know, I tell him. He turns on the news, says, Come on, get to the terrorist stuff.

When he leaves to get coffee I imagine him spilling the coffee on himself, getting third-degree burns that fuse his fingers together. I imagine him getting stuck in the elevator, the cables breaking and the elevator plummeting him to his death, though the hospital is only three floors high. I wonder if it's possible that an air bubble got injected into his bloodstream in the crash somehow, that it will reach his heart and he'll go down, his heart exploding like a firecracker in an apple. - Linsay Hunter, "Unpreparing" (which you can read here) from her book Daddy's (part of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year "challenge.")

going places

Laughing, telling stories, even a bit cocky, Beckman would finger the badge with his taxi number on it while his mother's eyes, with unblinking persistence, told him he was miserable, and his father, puffing a cigar against doctor's orders, sat quietly, politely killing himself, nodding, chuckling at the stories until Beckment left and he could stagger out of the room and grope down the wall to his bed. Behind the wheel, Beckman flicked the ignition key, squinted his mind's eye, and saw his father prostrate with a headache, and Beckman gunned the motor, gunned house and street, his mother's eyes and fathers rotten heart and headache. - Leonard Michaels, from the "Going Places" in his Collected Stories (part of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year "challenge.")

Mueseum of the Weird

She often made a joke about the last gift her grandmother sent, a single pair of red socks with a row of embroidered polar bears. She wore the socks, and when anyone remarked on them, she would say, those were the last present my grandmother gave before her passing.

She never would seriously say "passing." Her grandmother hadn't driven in years and likely wouldn't utilize the HOV lane, but June imagined the woman in a dirty red sedan, flipping the bird as she tore around a school bus and howling at the idea that a pair of socks could make so many people feel like shit. - Amelia Gray "Death of a Beast" from Museum of the Weird (book #1 of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year challenge)