Getting Sidetracked

So yesterday we took the Grand Tour of Fargo, which we do about every three or four months. This consists of going to the cooking store, Barnes and Noble, and usually Bennigan's because I can get a veggie burger (joy! to order burger and fries in a restaurant), and because we can also get very large mugs of Guinness.

Anyway, in Barnes & Noble, the plan was to get a GRE study book, which I did, before I promptly got sidetracked. This does not upset me because it always happens in bookstores, and really isn't that the point of a bookstore? It's not like a hardware store where you go in and get your doorknob and your caulk or whatever (whatever you might be doing with a doorknob and caulk, that's certainly your own business). Bookstores are for browsing, and unfortunately for me I rarely walk out of B&N without suffering the consequences. I tell myself that there are worse things to spend money on than books (in fact, most things are worse, don't you think?), and that helps soothe my fevered checkbook and rationalize the way for another spending spree.

Yesterday I got lucky. I managed to limit myself to two books (other than the GRE book): Rule of the Bone, by Russell Banks, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (see sidebar for links). Both for very specific reasons.

I bought Rule of the Bone because it is a first-person narrative of a 14 year old boy. I'm writing something right now from the same age, and it is first-person as of yet, so I wanted to see how it worked. Call it research. I spent the better part of today sucked into it, and am about halfway through. Very compelling. IIt's difficult to sustain a novel with a voice like this one - first person, young - without the reader tiring of the eccentricities of the narrator's speech like slang, etc. And as far as writing convention goes, you hear (or rather, I hear) stuff about first vs. third person, and how third-person is the most often used, and sometimes the implication is that it is what one should use. So I was swaying towards shifting my story to the third-person. But this book has sort of renewed my faith in the first person. Yes, it can be done, and done well!

The other book, AHWOSG, well, it has the kind of reviews on it that make you think that this book may indeed solve world hunger. Or rather, sort of make you think it'd better, for all the fuss that is being made about it. But they're all reviewers that I respect, and I'm sure it's incredible, so I'm looking forward to that. I have to admit, that the reason I went looking for it was because I read an interview with Dave Eggers in Stop Smiling magazine, and found out that he is from Lake Forest, which is the rich kid suburb that is right next to Libertyville, the not-so-rich-but-upper-middle-class suburb that I lived in from age twelve on. No, that wasn't the only interesting thing he talked about, of course, not even the most interesting. But I'd been planning to get his book for a while, and then this article made him stick in my head. Because, in a way, he's from the old neighborhood. Okay, so he was from the part of the neighborhood where everyone looks like those Abercrombie and Fitch catalog people (only not quite so gorgeous), but Lake Forest actually had some cool folk there. Enough already about Lake Forest. Anyway that's the next book on my list.

And the GRE book? Oh yeah, I suppose I should be hitting that. Right after I finish with these two...