This afternoon I finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. An entertaining novel with some interesting ideas about the connections between computers and religion and the brain’s capacity for language, although the plot could have been better done. I thought the book ended pretty lamely. Still, Stephenson has a pretty creative imagination.

Sitting on my bookshelf for a while has been Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This is one of the most amazing, intellectually dense books ever written; it was sitting in my parents basement until I pilfered it over a year ago. I began reading it but put it down one day and never got back to it; I think my next reading project may be this one.

But my aunt recently sent me three books for my birthday (Amazon sent them several weeks late), which I also have to add to my list of things to read. I didn’t ask for them, but they look interesting: A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, the first part of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s memoir; Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas; and I’d Hate Myself in the Morning, a memoir by Ring Lardner, Jr., who was a member of the Hollywood Ten who were jailed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and who was then blacklisted. I guess I’ll be delving into the twentieth century for a while…

My bookshelves also contain a bunch of other books that have bookmarks partway through, indications that I began reading them and at some forgot about them, including a biography of J.P. Morgan; a history of gay America in the twentieth century by John Laughery; Penguin’s History of the World; John Irving’s A Widow for One Year; Edmund White’s A Farewell Symphony; The Tube: The Invention of Television; William Least Heat Moon’s PrairyErth; and so on. Not to mention books that I got really cheaply but haven’t had a chance to read, such as Elizabeth Drew’s On the Edge; David Maraniss’s biography of Bill Clinton; a book on the Supreme Court called The Center Holds; James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, about the Civil War; Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon; and some others. (I could link all these books to their descriptions on Amazon, but that would take way too long.)

So, I’m a book collector. I also have a fickle mind. Things that seemed interesting at one time later lost their luster, and some reading projects that seemed riveting in theory turned out to seem less so when it got to actually reading the book. I still have a long biography of William Lloyd Garrison that I bought last summer but only got ten pages into. I do want to get back to that one, actually. So you’d think I’d have plenty of books to read now without going out and buying some new ones. But you’d be wrong.

Kind of like how I am with classical music CDs: I have a bunch of them that I’ve listened to only once, or less than once, or not at all.

My life has way too much detritus.