Book Diet--High Calorie, High Carb

So if I compared my reading habits to eating habits, you could say I've been on a junk food binge. With all the papers and stories to complete, with all the jobs to work and complain about throughout the school year, I didn't have time to pick up anything good. Romance novels, online horoscopes, the backs of DVD covers--that kind of junk puts fat on your brain; I risked becoming the kind of person who enjoys "Britney and Kevin: Chaotic" without irony.

I'm better now. I finished Anna Karenina after almost a year of picking through the chapters, nibbling on paragraphs here and there. And then I gobbled up some Jamaica Kincaid in about three days. I got sick on it. You have to be careful when you re-introduce postcolonial reflections to your literary diet. The extended metaphors were a little too rich to stomach.

And that brings us to the DeLillo novel, White Noise. Hey, Stephanie, do you remember one night when we were in the Academy, and I'd just gotten a new journal, and I said something like, "Hm, one-hundred twenty blank pages; I'm assuming I'm going to be alive to fill them up for at least three more months"? You rolled your eyes at me because I think you were tired of my Thomas Hardy-Tess of the D'Urbervilles bullcorn. Okay, so that novel? It's like that attempted conversation, only 300 pages long with allusions to name brands and an "airborne toxic event."

It's too soon to know how much I liked the novel. I do know I like the phrase "the point of Babette." Babette, Jack Gladney's wife, fears death so much, she takes an experimental drug to dull her terror. Her husband insists that isn't her point--not secrets, not fear of death; that's supposed to be his schtick.

(There will be no discussion, by the way, of death or the number of blank pages in my new journals on The Point of Babette. I'm over that, Stephanie, really.)

I felt sleepy and anxious as I read the last pages of White Noise. It could have something to do with the prose, but probably has more to do with the apple martinis I'd had. Have to chase these things down with something.

The Point of Babette

"The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me, she reveals and confides." -White Noise, Don DeLillo