Saturday, August 05, 2006

ILL Be Seeing You

Something weird happened to my template. I'd like to think I was the target of some sophisticated hacker bent on rescuing the world from my scritto owing to the dangerous ideas but I'm sure it was only the result of my hitting the wrong button or something. I got tired of trying to keep up the other stuff anyway.

I just finished Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano which was loaned to me by DOOL who borrowed it from TCCL on ILL. By the way, any book which adheres to the long tail of readership in the state of Oklahoma is undoubtedly held at TCCL. I'm not sure where they keep all their books - probably some Cold War era bunker under the Sun refinery in West Tulsa or something. I can't tell you how many times we don't have some awesome book and I'll check WorldCat to ILL it for someone and damned if it's not at TCCL. Tex used to get mad when we'd say anything about it, but it is true. Anyway, this book - eh, wasn't so great. I usually don't judge books that have been translated too harshly because it is technically out of the author's hands once it gets translated. It mainly consisted of dozens of half- or one-page dissertations from the mind of Galeano on soccer-related topics. The outcome was that in reading it I kind of felt like I'd picked up Marcel Proust hitchhiking on a highway outside of Moscow just after he'd had his morning pot of espresso and we faced an eight hour drive to St. Petersburg on ice with no brakes, half a tank of gas, no radio, and he really, really liked soccer.
I'm starting Mirth of A Nation to-nite.

1 comment:

Adjective Queen said...

That's a great description of the book. I read through it -- skimmed the last half. ILL in your title: you really crack me up!