Thiiiis Is My (beat) Once-A-Year Book!

I'm at work but feeling pretty physically crappy...last night around 10:30 I was suddenly hit by a mac truck of dizziness, and I spent the Daily Show and Colbert Report running back-and-forth between watching the television and praying to the porcelain goddess. I felt good enough to go to sleep but woke up this morning with a bitch of a headache and some residual dizziness and nausea. I managed to drag myself out of bed, to the gym for a shower (Con Ed may have finally cut off the common electricity, which our landlord apparently never paid for, so we had no hot water), and to work. I'm glad I came in, but my usual post-lunch exhaustion is especially strong today, combined with all the now thankfully low-level crappiness. So I'm going to blog for a couple of minutes to keep my spirits up.

Onto the subject of the post. A few people may know that I have a hard and fast rule about my reading: I may read one and only one Chuck Palahniuk nover per year. Two years ago during dead week I read Lullaby, last year at Myrtle Beach I read Choke and now that it's almost exactly one year later, it's time to choose another. Right now I'm thinking Stranger Than Fiction, his collection of true stories, although there's this one about a house where people gather and strange things start happening (WHAT!? In a CHUCK PALAHNIUK NOVEL!?) that sounds really cool. Neither of those were at the B&N I dropped by this morning (so many gift certificates), so I've added three of their books to the list of possibilities. Anyway, hopefully I will have chosen by the end of the day. If you have any immediate tips, please let me know.

And speaking of books, I just finished a great novel by a Yale professor Barry McCrea. My friend Beth took a class with him last year and really (really) liked him, and then I saw him listed in the Advocate as a gay-writer-you-haven't-heard-of-and-you-should-HANG-YOUR-HEAD-IN-SHAME. So it turns out he has a book, The First Verse, about a contemporary Dublin student who gets involved in a literary cult. I'm always a huge fan of novels and art that combine insightful realism with an elegant touch of the supernatural (there's less supernatural here than in Palahniuk, but since he's just sitting in the paragraph above, I should mention the tie). I started admiring McCrea when I read a brief essay of his in the Sex Week at Yale magazine. He talked about unrequited love (it shows up in this book, too), and I felt somewhat grateful that he had taken what everyone refers to as an "obsessive crush" and legitimized it—couldn't hurt that it was coming from a cute, gay, brilliant, Irish teacher either. Right. He had some great behavioral observations that resonated with me, and his characters in this book are just as excitingly real. It's very prose-y, but in a way that works. Sometimes that shit doesn't, but here it does. Read it, y'all.

More later, I hope.