This is all just so I can tell a very short Bob story at the end

Last night we were talking about the books we've read that have really made an impression on us. This wasn't that conversation called "Which is your best book?" It's more that there are certain books that you read at certain points in your life that leave you sort of suspiciously wondering if it was written particularly for you. And obviously not in the way of it just mirroring your life or whatever. It's more that thing of the writer apparently conspiring with your present set of circumstances to essentially just run you over.

For example: Dan read Seize The Day like a week before Isaac was born, and it completely completely owned him. "I had to go for a drive," is what he said. And the thing is, I read it a while ago and really liked it, and thought about it for a bit, but there are other Saul Bellow books I have got into way more.

One of my ones, for some reason, is All The Pretty Horses. It's very strange, because I don't even so much like Cormac McCarthy, even though lots of people I think are really smart just love him. Like I thought The Road was a real pits and a drag, and that sort of "sparse" "stripped down" thing of "having such a manly uncompromising vision of the future that doesn't cater to our effete sensibilities and sees somehow beyond them into the yawning chasm of what lies ahead, where the only thing that exists is what fucking ever" is my real worst. I think it is foolish.

But All The Pretty Horses just destroyed me. I cried the entire, entire way through. I was just about to go to university and there were all these sort of strange things happening, and horrible breakups and just about everything I did made me feel like I was making some kind of terrible mistake, and there was something about that book that made me feel like it had been written specifically to freak me out. I loved it so much. But I'm scared to read it again, because either I won't love it as much as I did, or else it'll make me feel all weird and sad and doomed again. I could never objectively sort of evaluate how good that book is, because it's so tied to this very tormented time in my little life.

James said his was 100 years of solitude, and painted this quite terrifying picture of him lying in a dark room reading it and becoming just unable to get out of bed for days. And then he told a great Bob story, which is probably not true, but I don't care. I love Bob so much. Basically, Bob hadn't had an acting job in like a million years, and it was winter, and he was tired and poor and had a cold, and was lying in bed reading The Count Of Monte Cristo, and was too Drained to even sit up in bed to turn the pages properly, so he just tore out each page of the book after he'd finished reading it. Just sort of lying in the semi-dark covered with pages torn from a book about revenge. Best ever.

This does sound like bullshit until I remember that my own mum once cut a John Irving book in half because it was too heavy for her little arms to lift while she was lying in bed.