This is World War II and everyone here is thinking of you.

One Wednesday night two weeks ago the sunset was surreal. The whole sky was yellow and there was a rainbow in the eastern sky and it was sprinkling a bit. Surreal evening. Gianna and I decided to walk to the waterfront and watch the rest of the sunset. It was quite stunning. We stood around and watched for about 10 minutes or so and then decided to change vantage points. We walked towards the fountain by the waterfront and on the ground I happened to find a soaking wet book face bown on the ground. I was super excited, so I picked it up and gave it a stare down. It was called The Girl on the Fridge written by Etgar Keret, who is an Israeli author. After scanning the covers and reading the reviews, it sounded like a really weird book, but I was intrigued. I took it home excited. It's a book filled with 46 different short stories none more than 5 pages long. Some are funny, others are sad, some hit you right in the gut, while others are just stupid little stories that make you laugh out loud. Separately they may not add up to much, but together they make a great collection, which is strangely cohesive and makes you want to keep reading. When I got home, I read the first story in it, called Asthma Attack.

"When you have an asthma attack, you can't breathe. When you can't breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn't much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones--those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance."

After that I was sold. Ended up blowing through the book and loving it. I'm going to be looking into his other book The Nimrod Flipout, and I see it's at the UVM library, so I'll have to check it out.

The book I was reading prior to that one was the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser. Millhauser is actually a family friend, and I have been meaning to read that book for years, but I never got around to it until this summer.

I started it two Sundays ago and read a little bit of it, but once Monday came, that was a whole different story. I read on my way to work, on my lunch break, on the walk home and then for three hours on my porch and couch. I finished it in Bliss Park leaning up against a tree when I went home for my uncle’s funeral.

Whilst reading, I kept imaging nineteenth-century New York City, it's boom and it's splendor, the entrepreneurial spirit in the air, the old pushing out the new. Some scenes depicted in the book at points are so grandiose and flamboyant that you don’t know what could top such things, but he manages to do it. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Martin Dressler and I need to delve into more Millhauser. I should shoot him an email.

What I’m reading next is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I’ll update when I finish that.

Also, went to a show at Metronome last night. Maps & Atlases, Laura Stevenson & The Cans, and Cults played. Great show, even though Cults had a horrible sound check/set-up. I didn't bring my camera to the show, but I'm sure you guys can google like champs. If I put up another mix I'll throw them on there!

God I hope I'm keeping this blog interesting enough.