Weather, and Wither

The snow is ugly now, surviving in clumps, some still tightly packed but covered in dirt and exhaust, losing to Spring, jagged pitiful. The newly freed grass, too, in places is ugly, so saturated it sinks at the touch, brown from the great weight it’s carried since December.

The yard is full of dog poop, but it’s way to wet for anyone to start cleaning it up yet.

On top of all that – The Big News – is that the Goodwill across from work is closing!

To refresh: the blog is supposed to be me reviewing books I find randomly at Goodwill, which I read while riding the bus to and from work. The cool thing is that the books are necessarily “random” – Goodwill doesn’t stock by popularity, or by request; it gets what people give it. Hence, you buy, not what you're looking for, but what is there.

Random.

Fortunately, I have a backlog (and I guess I have until June, when the store boards up, to increase the backlog). I’m currently reading All’s Quiet On The Western Front (review in maybe a week or so). And yet to come (note the randomness!):

Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
Murder at the National Cathedral (Margaret Truman)
Villa Incognito (Tom Robbins)
Unlearning to Fly (Jennifer Brice)
The Last Woman In His Life (Ellery Queen)
The Fruit of My Lipstick (Shelley Adina) (probably won’t even actually read that one)
Total Control (David Baldacci)
The Eagle’s Gift (Carlos Castaneda)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)
Rabbit Is Rich (John Updike)
Nevada (Zane Grey)
Giles Goat Boy (John Barth)
The Log From The Sea of Cortez (John Steinbeck)
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (Oscar Wilde)
Go Down Moses (William Faulkner)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain)
Miss Marple - The Complete Short Stories (Agatha Christie)
Death and the Dancing Footman (Ngaio March)
50 Great American Short Stories
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard)

That’s about a third of what’s left right now. So there's probably 3 or 4 years of reading ahead, even without a sourtce of new oldies. And I hope to be done with this hellish job by then anyway.

It has occurred to me that I need a publicist. Not for any selfish reason, but because it seems to me I'm performing something worthwhile here. We have a tendency to let things drop out of fashion and then, out of existence. Where, for instance, are the songs on the album Along Comes...The Association? Why isn't Your Show of Shows rerun on KPTM late at night?

And: what kid today is going to think: "Wonder if there's abook called All's Quiet on the Western Front." Probably none. Also probably not many thinking about Candide, or Winter of Our Discontent, or The Time Machine. Maybe (so I flatter myself) I can remind them such things exist. Sure, they know of Grapes of Wrath, have had Ivanhoe and Huckleberry Finn forced on them at school. But the Second Tier, Steinbeck's and Twain's Others, the little gems -- not a big market, not something they will think of on their own.

I hope I help a little in keeping these things in mind.