People Just Don't Read No More

They really should. It's been proven to raise your IQ as rated by People on the Bus with You, to support our eyeglass and flashlight economy and to enlarge your penis after just 14 words. Now, you could go on as you have, reading nonsense like this on the Internet, but you should know that Internet words are like anti-matter to literature words. This is also true of the Business and Lifestyle sections of the newspaper and any magazine that contains pictures of shoes and/or chest hair. So, basically every day you're participating in the eradication of literature. You're like the Nothing in The Neverending Story. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

In order to save Fantastica and the Childlike Empress, I've decided to share what I've read in this space in a new semi-regular column I'm going to call "I Wish I Were Nick Hornby and Read for a Living."

So, here's your first installment. I recently finished a book I got from the McSweeney's book club called "Vacation," by Deb Olin Unferth:

It's about a guy with a misshapen head following his wife who is following another guy with a brain tumor and running into another guy who un-trains dolphins, who is being followed by a woman who just found out he's her father after the man she thought was her father, who had a misshapen head, died. But it's really all very simple and beautiful. It has that kind of writing that makes me think that maybe I could write like that someday, because she (the writer) has the same sense of humor as me, but then I realize that she's doing all kinds of fun things with words that I wouldn't ever think of, and so I think maybe she'd just like to be my friend and come over for scones and cream tea cooked by Houseboy, because maybe she doesn't have a Houseboy who makes scones. Or clotted cream.

So, there's your introduction to the world of literature. Go read now, quickly, before all the words in this post disappear from the World of Imagination forever!