I’ve had a sore throat for the past few days, which means I’ve got this awesome Iggy-Pop-on-the-talking-tracks-from-the-avenue b-album thing going on. Since I’m alone it’s resulted in my reciting various words that I think might sound cool and showing off how rough and tumble my vocal chords are right now. So far I’ve done the lyrics to “Shadowplay” by Joy Division and excerpts from John McCain’s speech the other night. I’m open to suggestions.

Meanwhile, it’s a lovely day in London town, which always makes me suspicious. If I go somewhere to try to take advantage of it, the odds are it’ll turn on me. Yesterday was nice, too, and I went to Regent’s Park, where I stood by a gate in the London Zoo and watched giraffes for way too long. I must have looked like a pervert, and if anyone had spoken to me to inquire and heard my rasped vocal, there would have been no doubt. no, I’d have insisted, my voice full of phlegm and gravel, i’m looking at the animals! the animals!

But I caught myself, and instead headed up to Primrose Hill to look over at the city from a few miles away and read soon i will be invincible for a few hours. The weather held, and it turned out to be a pretty pleasant afternoon.

What are the odds of that working twice in a row? In london?

I finished a couple of books recently and promptly forgot to write about them. One of them, a disorder peculiar to the country, is sort of a zany divorce/9-11 farce that opens with a stellar hook- a couple in the midst of a messy divorce, one of whom was booked for a flight on United 93 and the other who works on an upper floor of the second tower, are both secretly overjoyed on September 11th because they think that the other is dead. It turns out they both survive, and the thing gets silly from there. It doesn’t spend much time dealing with the politics or even the moral question of whether or not it’s cool to use September 11th as a plot device in a comedy, and instead follows these mostly loathsome characters for two hundred pages before wrapping up in a confusing end. I say mostly loathsome because, hell, I finished the book, which meant there must have been something there. I just couldn’t remember what that was ten minutes after I put it down.

The other one, fortress of solitude by Jonathan Lethem, was terrific. The first three hundred pages were the best thing I’ve read in a novel since what is the what, just really terrific and compelling stuff, a real reminder of why good books are important. There’s a real departure in tone after that, as it jumps twenty years into the future and switches to first-person narration, but I can’t tell if I was a little dissatisfied by that because I liked the first 3/5 so much, or if it’s really a problem.

And now i shall be invincible, which is a neat, vaguely literary-fiction superhero novel. The US cover made it look pretty appealing, but the copy I have right now is a hideous Brian Hitch illustration that looks downright goofy on this book. And I like Hitch’s work a lot. But it’s a fun read, and I can’t expect it’ll take more than a couple of days to get through.

I’m finding the process of tracking my reading habits to be really useful for a couple of reasons; I recommend it to anyone. For one, it gets you to read more, as thinking about books as a thing you expect of yourself means that you’re more likely to get through them. I go through phases where I hardly read anything at all, but those have become a lot less frequent since I started writing it all down. It also helps me focus on reading things that I’m really interested in, rather than half-assedly trying to get through something I don’t care about because I think I should. It’s useful, and I definitely recommend it.

And for now, I suppose I’ll compromise on the day- I won’t take a bus to Finsbury Park or a train to Hampstead Heath, but why not head down to the garden on the corner and read for a while? I am a gentleman of leisure, after all, and I owe no explanations to anyone.