Monday, January 31, 2011

Ur-Texts: One Man's Meat III

"We never used to identify songbirds, we used to lump them and listen to them sing. But my wife, through a stroke of ill fortune, somehow got hold of a book called A Field Guide to the Birds -- Including All Species Found in Eastern North America, by Roger Tory Peterson, and now we can't settle down to any piece of work without being interrupted by a warbler trying to look like another warbler and succeeding admirably."

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I'm almost done with "One Man's Meat," and will immediately thereafter move on to "Moby-Dick, or, The Whale," hopefully finishing before February is out. Spring is coming, and Heather will be back on this continent, and while the reading of so momentous and slow-moving a text could survive either of those impending changes, the simultaneous arrival of both will be so exhilarating as to force to me to read lighter, springier stuff.