Of course I missed the Jonathan Raymond reading at Powell's last night, big loser that I am. Readings make me uncomfortable but it's important to support authors, especially ones who are promoting first novels. I bought the book in hardcover, that's my support. The Half-Life is on my short stack, along with Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, those two will make a nice pairing. When I read books these days I always try to find some kind of recoverable position for them in my head like a dog burying a bone, place them in some tenuous kind of framework of theme or personal chain of connections however sketchy, otherwise they just become part of this shapeless mass of consumption. My reading follows no pattern, I'm all over the place, no wonder I never remember anything. So I'm trying to change that. I'm hyperaware of the enormity of my reading list, all the books I'd need to read just to escape the feeling of being a total ignoramus. So if I put The Half-Life with the Spanbauer, or put The Grandmothers with Wisconsin Death Trip and A Prayer For the Dying by Stewart O'Nan, maybe somehow some little constellations or associative clusters will be formed, some illusion of mental coherence. This is why I was such a terrible student, I could never stay interested in one thing very long. Well, that's one of the reasons anyway.