I don’t usually like painted nails like this, but these are pretty cool. And look! There’s also bacon and pencils.

I have not forgotten you, blog. I have been working incredibly hard to finish up a bunch of projects before I go to Spain on October 16, and that has been taking up all my time. However, we have made progress on our bathroom, which I will post on here soon. And last weekend, we went camping in Humboldt to escape this burst of hot weather and I took lots of pictures, which I will also be posting.

In the meantime, I joined Goodreads, a social networking site about books. If you are on there, be my friend. Here is my review of Underworld by Don DeLillo:

It took me forever to finish this book. I have no idea why it was so slow going, but it’s done now and I am relieved.

There’s no doubt that this is a masterfully written book. The structure alone is worth studying, how DeLillo seems to drop and pick up the threads so often that you almost forget he’s telling a story, but then in the end he ties everything together, which makes the novel satisfying enough to justify the long read. I respect what he’s doing here, and the book made me think about things like why people are so obsessed with collectibles and the difficulty of verifying the true history of any given object, and so on. The scenes between characters, when he chooses to write them, are brilliant and detailed and draw you into the characters’ minds enough that you still care what happens to them 50 pages later when they reemerge in the narrative.

That said, I don’t know why DeLillo isn’t criticized more for being heavy handed. All through this book, I felt like the dude was hitting me over the head with his many important ! points! During a baseball game, advertisements are literally raining down on peoples’ heads, because America is consumerist, don’t you know. Even when we are enjoying our national pastime, consumerism! And did you know that people don’t listen to each other? They say things and then the other person says something, but they are different things! They don’t listen! America, with its waste and loneliness. Crazy, huh? There is something inherently affected about this writer that has always turned me off, and this book, while brilliant, is no exception.