Cowboys Are My Weakness

This book somehow made its way into the pile I was buying at Half Price Books. No wonder the checkout guy said "These are all over the place" while he rang them up, which at the time I took as an insulting comment about the incoherence of my lists, a criticism that I had to spend the next few minutes mentally attempting to debunk (not that he had seen the lists, no, I was projecting).

This just seems to symbolize the whole process somehow.

Nightwood

I'm about two and a half chapters in now. So far we have:

Felix, an Austrian (or German? I forget. The book was published just before WWII, so . . . ) Jew, and a fake baron (but fakeness inherited through his father). More comfortable with people of the "underworld," i.e. circus. (Is this underworld "Nightwood" itself?) But obsessed with "great men"; the nobility; history.

Robin Vote. The back of the book says she destroys people's lives. Kind of a cipher. Heavy. They just had a son, and now she has run away.

The doctor (Matthew O'Something, I think). Holds forth a lot. Forceful. Amoral. Irish. Makes other people pay for the drinks. The back says "one of the most remarkable characters in fiction."

Lots of adjectives. Lots of figures. At first I really liked it, now not so sure . . . I never like domineering pedants in real life, not sure I like them in fiction either . . . but also not sure what all this is hanging together into.

The Sound and the Fury