Well, I scuttled another evening in a bookstore looking for the meaning of life.
I started over in the music, looking for some musical force of nature to stir me, to entrance me.
Would you, Tchaik, transport me from this present world with your Russian wizardry, as you have before? Not this time.
Ludwig, what charms might you work? That would depend on the interpretation of the instrumentalist, upon which I am loath to speculate monetarily.
Ah, a collection of overtures. Three overtures. I need more bang for my buck.
Schumann, where art thou? Not here. Either the previous customers had excellent taste, or the compilers of inventory had poor.
Yanni. Yanni? Yes, Yanni. I had strayed from Classical into New Age, as in No Estimable Worth Ambiguous Genre Entrancement
Aside from being vain, the search was further hampered by sidelong mental glances at my fellow seeker, the elderly gentleman who suffered from an apparent lack of taste, and a certain lack of Crest and respect for personal space.
No matter, there are Tibetan mountains elsewhere in the store.
The classics. Melville, what do you have to say? Life is a fleshing out of a prerecorded narrative.
Homer . . . . naaaahh.
Dickens? An astute commentator of human nature, a gentle satirist, and a fine storyteller, but I'm looking for something new.
Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte? Might try Bronte, Ann, the one Devan wants me to read, but she has it at home.
Austen? Please, I am male.
London? Well, no tea parties in here. It's man against the elements. Man ain't got a chance. So, why bother?
Around to the Christian fiction. Mostly prosaic, but y'never know what you might stumble across.
Blackstock. Did I say prosaic?
Bunn. Good, very good. Alternates superbly written, spellbinding thrillers with superbly written, spellcasting sleepers.
Lahaye/Jenkins? I think maybe they've said all they have to say. But then, who's to say Christian thriller authors can't get as much mileage out of the end times as NPR can extract from Katrina or FOX from Hilton, Spears, and Lohann?
Morris. Wait, Morris? With the, the. . .that Winslow series, yeah. Volume what, 573?! The plot for this one includes a cameo with H.G. Wells' Time Traveller. Well, what do you know? The Winslow in the cover art has blazing blue eyes, a wedge-shaped jaw, and white, even teeth. I see they're still blow drying their hair in 2525.
Peretti? Well, I guess I could make it eight times for Piercing the Darkness, or eleven for The Visitation, but I already have it.
Philips, did I say prosaic? I meant formulaic.
Wick. Did I say formulaic? I meant Grace Livingston Hill. The villain in this one even has a weak chin. So kind of all the antagonists to sport identifying weak chins and weak, watery, pale eyes.
Religion section.
A book called Quantum Spirituality intrigues me. I've always been fascinated by the door quantum physics opens to the supernatural. So has the author. But he went out the back door and started thrashing around in the New Age backyard, and I put the book down and haven't seen him since.
Yes, I've always wanted Mary Magdalene for Dummies. Wonder what leering gnosticism lurks in the bowels of that book.
Never hurts to look for a NASB Study Bible. No luck. I could listen to an audio reading of the Bible by a cast of Hollywood narrators. I wonder if they have an audio book of An Inconvenient Truth read by Rush Limbaugh?
So, to the philosophy section.
Contemporary philosophy. What is that? Is that like Dippin' Dots, or listening to a MIDI file of the William Tell Overture?
Nietzsche. I never cease to be fascinated by the virulent little man. He exudes such a disarming, guileless arrogance. I understand Thus Spake Zarathustra for the first time in paperback was popular reading among the tenets of Auschwitz.
A collection of empiricist writings. Somebody compiled a collection of empiricists? If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't believe it.
Descartes. Kant. That's more like it, I think . . .therefore, I am going to go find Devan and have another whirl at the music section. Maybe Schumann was hiding.
3 comments:
I love it when you write like this!! You can make a simple trip to the bookstore come alive...
I very much enjoyed the tour of the bookstore. However, there were a couple of paragraphs I would have deleted before I hit the Post button. Although they did make me laugh. I noticed you never mentioned Lacy. He may be over your head :)
My favorite line -
"Lahaye/Jenkins? I think maybe they've said all they have to say. But then, who's to say Christian thriller authors can't get as much mileage out of the end times as NPR can extract from Katrina or FOX from Hilton, Spears, and Lohann?" You crack me up, when you're not making me think.
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