So far so good w/ Shandy. I've caught myself snorting a couple of times -- funny funny book. And I find myself tempted to stop and hunt down various words and philosophers and latin terms and places in the book, but if I do that the book will swallow me whole and you won't see me for a long time. So I'm pressing on and girding myself for a second reading w/ a good concordance and the dictionary and everything else.

For now, I just want to laugh and keep going.

What I'm reading right now is Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

Also read Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth. It's beautifully drawn -- thick crisp lines and w/ a love of angles and diagrams and odd details that should feel neurotic but works beautifully and cleanly. The story is sad and tender and then even more sad. It could only work as a comic book: its protagonist is a sadsack man-child w/ tremendous problems w/ his father (a problem that Ware skillfully weaves through several parallel stories involving Jimmy's family), and he is drawn as a sort of pudgy old man when he is very young and as a pudgy infant as a 36-year-old. It's a lovely book.

Finished Up in the Old Hotel this weekend. I could praise this book to the roof and it wouldn't be enough, I don't think. So I'll just say that the moment I finished the last page I had an overwhelming need to go back and read the whole thing over from the beginning, and I suspect when I eventually do give in to that temptation I will finish it w/ the same urge. That this is a book that will not stop asking to be read.

Hotel words & media: sawbuck (p 120) & concupiscent (p 252). Lady Olga (pp 89 - 105) appeared in Freaks. Wilmoth Houdini's (pp 252 - 266) Poor But Ambitious.

What I'm reading right now is Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell: I'm four pages into it and it's fantastic. I'm tempted to stop every three seconds and write down one or two of these sentences, they're so perfect, and they are so dead-on and right and there. (Hotel word: sulky (p. 5))

Finished The Woman in White (Gutenbert e-text here), which was appropriately creepy and good and disturbing. My estimation of the book went way higher as I reached the last few chapters: Fosco's account is fantastic (one can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style), and how Collins plays w/ it is positively Humbertian. Also: Pesca rises so much above the level of caricature that on the whole the book takes on some neat undertones. And of course the way the narrative is told -- that too is terrific. The Penguin introduction is good, but I'm glad I saved it for the end.

Some Fosco, because why not:

The bond of friendship which united Percival and myself was strengthened, on this occasion, by a touching similarity in the pecuniary position on his side and on mine. We both wanted money. Immense necessity! Universal want! Is there a civilised human being who does not feel for us? How insensible must that man be! Or how rich!

Later today... Hotel people, things, and paintings: Sloan's McSorley-related paintings, Fannie Hurst, and Stutz automobiles.