I've been such a busy reader lately. I think all the books I drunk-ordered are in now, from both Amazon and Alibris, and after I gave away some of them (such as "Rex Barks," a modern guide to sentence diagramming) and filed away some books I bought in order to have duplicates to give away (such as F.V. Irish's 1883 book on sentence diagramming), I have been reading the ones I'm keeping. The first one I read and finished was "Locas," of course, and it was all I could do not to leave work early the day it arrived. I'm almost ready to read it again. Then I found a replacement copy of the monograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard from Aperture, with the hot-pink cover. It is a completely engrossing book, which is odd since it's mainly photographs and that's not usually something I get engrossed in. There's an appreciation by Guy Davenport and some other text by another writer I don't know, and an arrangement of photos that is different from the museum-related anthologies of his work. I had this book when I was 12 and read it to bits, then lent it to Paul Kimura, whose house and I assume the book were both destroyed in the Oakland fire.

I also got an anthology of war stories by science fiction writers. This is because of how much the book "Starship Troopers" blew my mind, and my general fascination with war stories. This was a neat idea for a book, and I would honestly read an anthology of war stories by almost any genre of writers, including romance. The highlight of this anthology, which I am not reading straight through and have not finished, is a tossup between "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card and "The Nuptial Flight of the Warbirds" by Algis Budrys, who write the very great HR novel "Rogue Moon." I would also read an anthology of HR stories by science fiction writers, and what "Ender's Game" shares with "Warbirds" is that they are both mainly parables of HR.

Then what else am I reading? I just looked into my Amazon account for the past six months, and realized I have given away every single other thing I ordered, including An Illustrated Guide to Lace, the soundtrack to Sabrina the Teenage Witch (on which Matthew Sweet sings "Magnet & Steel"; it was a penny), and many other things. So what, exactly, in my busy life, am I reading?