auster, calvino, auster, calvino, (borges?), cervantes

i have never read "don quixote." there are some things which i feel i have absorbed on a cultural level, or feel i know enough about in order to understand them without having read them. or, at least, this is how i used to feel. i don't know, so much, anymore. after having read borges' "labyrinths," and now, auster's "new york trilogy," i feel as though i'm missing something. but wandering into my favourite used book store yesterday & picking up a copy of the cervantes left me baffled. it's one of those books that just requires more effort than i have to invest in anything right now.

but i keep reading books that make me: A) never want to write again, and B) want to die. the latter feeling is nice around the edges - it's like total admiration, the kind of idolatry for the craft of words that makes me abase myself in front of it. some phrase from Auster - "he thought he would find himself in the words" - made me question why i even read books, or why i wrote, or why i really did anything. bastard.

so, next, then, and already a few in, a book of italo calvino's short stories - "numbers in the dark," which is already making me slightly crazy. i have no idea what's next.

also, i seem to have become oddly obsessed with the i ching.