terrifying and fortifying

the one thing about being alone (well, alone avec bebe) during the day is that I can read for long stretches of time without feeling antisocial. ok, so maybe long stretches of time don't occur in an uninterrupted fashion, but I can still squeeze the reading in between baby soothing jags. I finished Swamplandia! this morning, and I found it to be at once deeply disturbing and comforting. the writing is enveloping - something I don't remember feeling about the short stories - karen russell wrote the worlds out with a masterful combination of tragically comic invention, and hallucinatory, hypnotic description. what's tragic about this novel? well, first of all, it's one of the saddest coming-of-age stories I've ever read, and second of all, it made me realize that there are all sorts of ways that we need to delude ourselves in order to cope with (insert word of choice here: e.g. self, world, life, rat-race). what's heartening about it? well, the fact that we can have loved ones to share delusions with. maybe you don't ever have this feeling, but sometimes I wonder just how incorrectly I perceive myself and my actions. most of the time that feeling is way way way deep down, but books like this bring it to the fore, and it gets sort of frightening to really go there. I mean, it's hard to be an impartial judge of oneself, so you know, it's easy to believe that one's idea of oneself is pretty much nothing but a favorable edit for the most part. and if our views of ourselves are mostly airbrushed reality, or even straight-up daydreamy fiction, well, what then????

so anyways, that book went back to the library today, and I picked up a couple of cook books, a book on ferns and mosses, and a book about the amazon river. no fiction - does anyone have any suggestions?