New book in the mail

Fresh out of the mailbox!

If I end up falling back into my habit of infrequent posting any time soon, then this time it won’t be because I’m distracted by beer and basketball (like every other time). No, this time it’s different: it’s because I’m likely to end up spending the next three or four years, Roget’s dictionary close at hand, trying to get through the 209 pages of Vincent Desportes’ La Guerre Probable (The Likely War). After two weeks’ wait and twenty-odd dollars in shipping charges the book arrived in my mailbox today via Amazon.fr. 

D. F. Wallace’s unfinished novel, from The New Yorker

I spent much of tonight [yes, I am that slow of a reader!] with “The Unfinished” an article in this week’s New Yorker about the truncated final novelistic effort of the staggeringly talented David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in September of last year at the age of (I think) 46. Wallace has been my favorite fiction writer since I read Infinite Jest — the 1,200-odd page tome for which he gained notoriety — during procrastination related to the writing of my graduate thesis back in 2002.